Moon rocks sell for $855,000 in New York

[Still Waters]

Three moon rocks brought to Earth nearly half a century ago and the only known documented lunar samples in private hands, sold for $855,000 in New York on Thursday, Sotheby's said.

The rocks, collected by an unmanned Soviet Luna-16 Mission in 1970, went for nearly double the $442,500 last paid for them by the present-day US sellers in a Sotheby's Russian space history sale in 1993.

They were originally the property of Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev—the former director of the Soviet space program—who was given them by the Soviet Union in honor of her husband's work.

Korolev was a rocket engineer, aircraft and spacecraft designer, and mastermind behind the Soviet space program during the 1950s and '60s.

https://phys.org/news/2018-11-moon-york-sotheby.html

[Rolci]

Keeping in mind that there was a cumulative 75% inflation of the USD in the past quarter century and then doing the math you realise that this nearly $1M baby has only been making $270 each month (in today's money) on average. The median household income in the US is approx. $5000 pcm. So it's like getting a 5% premium each month. Not impressed, considering what we are talking about here.

Edited November 30, 2018 by Rolci

[Seti42]

"Space exploration is something that's universal," said Sotheby's expert Cassandra Hatton.

So is avarice.

[fred_mc]

I think that in the future, at least in the far future, people will travel to the moon for mining, exploration, vacation etc, and be able to bring moon rocks with them home, so I'm pretty sure that long-term the value of the moon rocks will go down due to there being more available, making it not such a good investment.