The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin is a Texas-sized storehouse of artifacts, including one that’s so tiny it’s encased in Lucite just to magnify it.
It came from Apollo 17. On that final mission, and the five lunar excursions before it, astronauts gathered hundreds of pounds of moon rock and brought the samples back to the third rock from the sun.
Hundreds of tiny fragments from the first and last Apollo missions were given by the United States government to states and countries.
“To have a piece of another body in the heavens, the moon, that we actually went to and that a human being actually picked up... that’s incredible," exclaimed Joe Gutheinz.
But in nearly the same breath, he laments that the gifts were accompanied by an incredible failure.
“After we gave away 270 moon rocks to nations of the world, 135 in Apollo 11 and 135 in Apollo 17, we didn’t track them," he said. "And we were giving these moon rocks to some of the worst dictators in the world, like Gadhafi. And surprise, they were disappearing. It created a black market.”
Gutheinz is a Houston-area attorney. After a career as a federal agent and NASA investigator, he started teaching criminal justice college courses. He gave his students an especially tough assignment.
“I thought it was the safest, real-life investigation I could assign to my graduate students and undergraduate students. I didn’t want anybody coming back in a bag for looking for something," he said.
Gutheinz tasked them with finding missing moon rocks, some of which have been bought, sold, lost, inadvertently thrown away, or stolen.
He tells of a moon rock that ended up in a landfill, one that was offered for sale for $5 million, one that was found in a shoe box. Others were stolen, some were found hanging on office walls... or were stowed in desk drawers. He says one rock was given by a former governor to a business partner.
“The business partner dies and it ends up in the business partner’s brother’s garage," he said.
Some fragments have had journeys on Earth almost as epic as the journey they had getting here. Take this example.
“The moon rock was stolen, brought to Costa Rica, sold to a Baptist minister, who brings it to Nevada. A casino owner buys the moon rock from him for shares in his casino," he said.
But dogged research, phone calls, and visits by Gutheinz’s students paid off.
“One of my students found that Arkansas’ moon rock was missing. It turns out the person who had the moon rock in their archival possession was none other than Bill Clinton, former governor of Arkansas," he said.
Troy Hale of Michigan State University produced Missing Moon Rocks, a 2014 documentary detailing the work of Gutheinz and his students.
Missing Moon Rocks Documentary Watermark- PRIVATE VIEWING ONLY. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. from Troy on Vimeo.
Gutheinz’s classes exceeded expectations.
“I thought maybe we’d find a few," he said.
They found 78 moon rocks. And that number could climb higher.
“Africa, most of them are missing," he said. "Europe, some of them are missing."
Some former students are still on a mission to figure out where in this world dozens more rocks from that world disappeared to.
*Note: As mentioned above, you can see Texas’ Apollo 17 moon rock at the Bullock State History Museum in Austin. Texas’ other moon rock (from Apollo 11) is currently in storage at Museum Texas Tech University. Officials there expect to put the rock back on display in the next year or so.