page_title: Missouri lunar sample displays
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Missouri lunar sample displays / History
caption_attribution_description: Missouri State Capitol
context_page_description: The Missouri lunar sample displays are two commemorative plaques consisting of small fragments of Moon specimen brought back with the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 lunar missions and given in the 1970s to the people of the state of Missouri by United States President Richard Nixon as goodwill gifts.
context_section_description: In May 2010, The Record of Hackensack, a newspaper in northern New Jersey, reported that Missouri's "goodwill Moon rock" was lost and its location was unknown. The Missouri State Museum claimed its "goodwill Moon rock", worth millions of dollars, was securely housed at the Missouri State Capitol. The newspaper's pictures of the "goodwill Moon rock" were shown to Joseph Gutheinz, a former special agent with NASA's Office of Inspector General and a self-appointed investigator on the Apollo lunar sample displays. When Gutheinz saw the pictures, he pointed out the problem: they were pictures of the Apollo 11 "goodwill Moon rocks", which technically are nothing more than dust or Moon soil. The pictures showed four grain-size pebbles housed in a clear acrylic button the size of an American half dollar. While these 0.05 gram pebbles or dust particles are sometimes referred to as "Moon rocks", they were not the single Apollo 17 "goodwill Moon rock" of 1.14 grams. Discovering the location of the Apollo 17 "goodwill Moon rock" later became a passion for the museum. After an in-depth search of its records, the museum discovered that it never received the Missouri Apollo 17 lunar sample display with its single "goodwill Moon rock" weighing 1.14 grams. The display had been given to then-Missouri Governor Kit Bond in 1973 as a gift to the people of the state of Missouri, but it never went any further than his office.
  The Missouri archives staff checked their old records and discovered nothing in Bond's papers about any "Moon rock". The Bond administration at the time didn't enter it into any inventory control system, because they thought of the Apollo 17 "goodwill Moon rock" as a novelty and of little importance. A value of $5 million to $10 million has since been placed on the "Moon rock", because no other crewed Moon landings have occurred since 1972 and no other Moon material has been obtained since then. In December 2010, Bond turned over the Missouri Apollo 17 lunar sample display to current Governor Jay Nixon, and Nixon passed it on to the Missouri State Museum. The Apollo 17 display with the single Apollo 17 "goodwill Moon rock" of 1.14 grams is now at the Missouri State Museum, the same place as the Apollo 11 "goodwill Moon rocks" of 0.05 grams.
caption: Missouri State Capitol
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