Moon dust is object of lunar legal struggle between KC law firm and a lucky client
The lucky Illinois woman who got $1.8 million for a bag that went to the moon and back and cost her less than $1,000 is now poised to potentially make over a million dollars more selling residues of lunar material from that bag.
But not so fast, says a well-known Kansas City law firm. Wyrsch Hobbs Mirakian has sued Nancy Lee Carlson, asking a federal judge to block a sale until it’s determined whether the firm is entitled to a share of those profits for helping her obtain the moon dust from NASA after a year-long court battle.
“We think we have a contract and it ought to be honored,” said law firm partner Stephen Mirakian. “We did a good job for her.”
Carlson owns five strips of double-sided adhesive tape that are thought to be encrusted with extraterrestrial grit that astronaut Neil Armstrong collected during the first manned U.S. moon mission.
The lunar material was embedded in a 11.5-inch zippered bag that Armstrong used to store some of the 47.5 pounds of rocks and soil that he and Buzz Aldrin retrieved from the lunar surface at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969.
NASA considers the bag priceless. Carlson bought it for $995 in 2015 through an online government-sponsored auction after it was mistakenly put up for sale. She resold it two years later for $1.8 million after a prolonged and very public legal battle with the space agency, which fought in court to get it back and lost.
The tape strips, which NASA used to authenticate the bag by lifting dust from its fabric, could be worth a lot of money, depending on how much moon dust is on them.
How valuable?
“If the five strips were sold together as one lot, I think definitely seven figures,” said space historian Robert Pearlman, founder and editor of collectSPACE.com, a Houston-based site dedicated to the history of space exploration and news about space memorabilia. “Probably somewhere close to what the bag sold for.”
Disputed contract
Or it could be less. No one knows for sure. What is also not clear is whether Wyrsch Hobbs Mirakian is entitled to the 28.5 percent share of any sale proceeds the law firm says it is owed for convincing NASA to agree to return the tape strips to Carlson.
Mirakian told The Star there’s no question. It was understood from the beginning of their relationship that the firm would help Carlson test and sell the tape strips, after securing them from NASA, and receive a percentage of the sale price as payment.
But Carlson says no. That was not part of the deal. Their dispute is central to a lawsuit that last month began wending its way through the federal court system after being transferred from state court.
It is the latest, though perhaps not the last, installment in a quirky tale that began to get interesting after Armstrong and the moon dust bag returned to Earth 51 years ago. Somehow NASA lost track of the bag, only to have it resurface decades later in a garage in Hutchinson, Kansas. It then found its way to Carlson’s house in the Chicago suburbs, where it sat in a closet until she and the rest of the world learned it was something very special.
In a brief telephone interview, Carlson, a real-estate attorney and space history buff in her 60s, politely declined to discuss the case and the events leading up to it while it’s still pending in court.
“Wait a little while and, eventually, you’ll have a better story, I think, when it’s all finished, and that’s all I can tell you,” she said.
But while we await the conclusion, consider the intriguing story as it’s transpired so far.
Curious journey
After Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins returned home, the “white, zippered flown Lunar Sample Return Bag,” as it was called in the auction sales catalog, was emptied and cast aside.
How the bag wound up in Max Ary’s garage in Hutchinson is not entirely clear. But as head of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, now shortened to The Cosmosphere, Ary had access to thousands of donated and loaned artifacts from NASA and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
He also was a private collector who bought and sold space memorabilia. In 2003, Ary was accused of stealing artifacts from the Cosmosphere and reselling them. He was convicted of money laundering three years later, sentenced to prison and ordered to forfeit $76,000 as restitution.
To satisfy that debt, the U.S. Marshals Service hired a private auction company to sell items from Ary’s collection. Among them was the outer containment bag that Armstrong stuffed with other bags full of moon rocks..
Although on loan to the Cosmosphere, the feds found it commingled with Ary’s stuff and, due to poor record keeping, no one knew it had any connection to Apollo 11 and the first man to step on the moon.
Neither did Carlson have a hunch when she bought it. But as a space buff from the time she was a kid in Michigan watching the moon landing on TV, she was curious and began making calls.
One of those she reached was Pearlman at collectSPACE, the expert who now thinks the tape strips might be worth millions. He remembers referring Carlson to someone at the Johnson Space Center in Houston who he thought might be able to help her learn what exactly she had bought.
“We didn’t know that it had flown on a mission,” Pearlman said. And because she’d obtained it through a government auction, “I figured that if it was legal and if it was of lunar origin, they would just return it to her.”
He assumed wrong. Months after Ryan Ziegler, the Apollo Sample Curator at NASA, agreed to investigate the bag’s origin at Carlson’s request, he wrote back.
Yes, the bag had moon dust in it, and yes, it was from Apollo 11. But the message from Houston was, we have a problem.
“In normal circumstances, this is where I would turn things over to our (inspector general’s) office and they would ask whoever had the material to return it to NASA, since all lunar samples are considered property of the US government,” Ziegler told her, according to court documents.
“Given that you bought this at a U.S. government sanctioned auction, obviously that complicates things.”
Legal disagreements
She asked if she might come pick up the bag, but he strung her along with excuses, according to the court record. A trip to Europe. His mother was visiting. Things escalated after that.
Two months after Ziegler mentioned potential complications, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Wichita office called to tell Carlson she wouldn’t be getting her bag back. NASA was keeping it. The attorney then followed up with a letter offering to refund what Carlson had paid for the bag along with an additional $1,000 for her trouble.
Carlson refused, setting off a nearly year-long legal battle that NASA ultimately lost. While it was true, a judge ruled, that the bag had been sold by mistake and that NASA considered it a priceless national treasure, Carlson bought it in good faith from Uncle Sam.
She owned it fair and square.
“I’m thrilled we won,” she told the Chicago Tribune in March 2017. “This is like the Holy Grail.”
She auctioned it off later that year, promising to give some of the money to charity. Without saying who benefited or how much, she told The Star that the charity was thankful for her large gift.
“In my world, I thought it was substantial,” she said.
The price she got for the bag, however, was not as substantial as she had hoped. Sotheby’s had thought it might bring anywhere from $2 million to $4 million, but the top bid came in almost $200,000 below the minimum estimate.
After her Kansas City lawyer, Christopher McHugh with the Siegfried Bingham firm, was paid his share of a little over half a million dollars, Carlson was left with around $1.3 million before taxes.
Not a bad return on a $995 purchase. Still, Carlson believed the bag would have gone for more had NASA not raised such a public fuss and damaged the bag with the tape strip testing. So in August 2017, she retained Wyrsch Hobbs Mirakian to seek monetary damages and the return of the tape strips that Ziegler had told her might be valuable.
The firm filed suit in January 2019. Then on Jan. 16 of this year, Carlson attended a mediation session at an office on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City where a settlement was hammered out.
In exchange for her dropping the lawsuit, the government agreed to pay Carlson $50,000 and hand over the five tape strips. Her lawyers looked forward to getting paid for their time and expenses, plus a big bonus when the tape strips were sold.
In an email to Carlson two weeks after the settlement conference, attorney Mirakian outlined the next steps in the case and spelled out the firm’s expectations for after NASA finally sent her the tape strips that had been put in storage four years ago.
“Pursuant to the Fee Agreement, though the tapes are owned by you and will be in your possession, WHM will have a lien on the tapes and any proceeds you receive,” Mirakian wrote.
“…it is our expectation that you intend to sell the tapes for as much as the market will bear and to do so quickly and as reasonably practicable.”
Mirakian said he was “very surprised” when Carlson fired the firm two days later. She acknowledged in subsequent court filings that, while their agreement did entitle the firm to 28.5 percent of any cash payment, there was nothing in it specifically mentioning sale of the tape strips.
“But that was always the understanding,” Mirakian told The Star. He finds her reasons for backing out of their deal confusing.
“She keeps changing her story,” he said, adding that Carlson had also attempted to back out of the settlement with NASA for reasons he didn’t understand.
Sometime after U.S. District Court Judge J. Thomas Marten in Kansas City, Kansas, granted the government’s motion to enforce the agreement in July, NASA shipped the tape strips to Carlson’s home in Inverness, Illinois, along with the cash payment, Wyrsch Hobbs Mirakian claims in its lawsuit.
Carlson has not said what she plans to do with tape strips. The suit asks a judge to prevent any sale until the case is decided. No hearing date has been set.
