841 Pounds of Moon Rock

There are almost 842 pounds of moon rock on earth. Most of it was gathered during the Apollo missions, and about 841 of these pounds are under US Government control. The tiny balance, writes Christopher S. Stewart in the April issue of Wired, might be available from “RS” which stands for Russian Space, a Polish national who specializes in space suits, space gloves and other paraphernalia gathered from the Russian Space Agency.

There is quite a market on EBay for items like space suits and even the Buran Space Shuttle can be had, for a price of around $8 million. People love collecting this stuf, says Richard Pearlman, who runs an online dealer called collectspace.com. “it is about tapping into these emotions. People will pay a lot for that.”