On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress about landing men on the Moon. It was a speech that made thousands of people, scientists, technicians, workers, engineers, and administrators, work together. Over eight years later, on July 20, 1969, what was once a dream became a reality when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon's surface. A few hours after the landing, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came out of the spacecraft and stepped onto the dusty lunar surface.
The Apollo 11 mission, however, not only aimed to bring men to the Moon but also to collect lunar dust for study. The collection of lunar material was assigned to Armstrong, who put about a kilogram of lunar dust on a Teflon bag.
Unfortunately, NASA lost this Teflon bag some years later, and it would land in the personal collection of a former curator of the Cosmosphere museum in Kansas. While NASA did prove that the Teflon bag was from the Apollo 11 mission, the agency was ordered to return five of the six scanning electron microscope (SEM) sample stubs that contained the Apollo lunar dust from the bag. This decision made said lunar dust the only verified samples to be legally sold.
(Images: Bonham)
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