Among the items was a bag. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but if this was a pouch that NASA had used during space expedition, that’s pretty cool. An Illinois woman named Nancy Carlson won the auction by offering a bid of $995. To find out if the bag really was as cool as she hoped, she mailed it to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, asking NASA to authenticate it for her.
NASA determined that it was authentic all right. Only, it was more than just a bag. It was a bag that contained traces of moon dust collected during Apollo 11. No one is allowed to buy and sell moon dust, that’s a treasure that NASA keeps for itself, or possibly saves as gifts for honored kings. So, NASA said this bag should never have gone up for auction, and they refused to return it to Carlson.
![moon dust](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/3/2/5/1116325.jpg)
Here’s another case where it fell to the courts to set right what was wrong. Carson sued and won. NASA had to give her the bag back, and now that it had been officially declared as precious, she was able to sell it for a bit more than $995. She sent it for auction again, and this time, it sold for $1.8 million.
That wasn’t the end of the story, however. When the auction analyzed the bag, they realized NASA had removed a fraction of that dust when analyzing it. So, Carlson sued again — and won again. NASA sent her back those specs of dust (which had stuck to some tape they’d applied to the bag), and she managed to auction those off as well, for a further $500,000.