[wordup] How an Intern Stole NASA's Moon Rocks

[Adam Shand]

It's hard to know if this is actually true or not.  It smells like  
bullshit but there's quite a lot of information on the net about it  
from apparently reputable sources.  So who knows ...

Adam.

From: John Wojtacha <jcw at scsak...>
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5242736/how-an-intern-stole-nasas-moon-rocks

In 2002, rogue NASA interns stole millions of dollars in moon rocks.  
This is the untold story of how they did it.
Building 31 North's white halls are empty, because it is the middle of  
the night. NASA interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany duck inside a  
bathroom, and tear off their clothing. Then they change into the  
contents of their duffel bags—2mm thick neoprene bodysuits. Like in a  
bad movie, the suits will help Thad and Tiffany avoid heat sensors  
armed to feel out threatening climate changes inside a vault. The  
adrenaline, their attraction, the smell of rubber suits and the fear  
of failure is almost overwhelming. After pulling on the thermally  
shielded gear, Tiffany and Thad step back into the corridor, moving  
toward the turnstile lock that guards their target: NASA's prized  
stash of moon rocks.

********

Building 31 North, which sits on the grounds of Houston's Johnson  
Space Center, is where NASA keeps all 600 pounds of the moon rocks it  
has secured. They are the sole property of the government, collected  
over six lunar missions and protected with the dramatic intensity of  
national treasures. Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on  
earth constructed under Class 100 standards—it is a structure that can  
withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability  
metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon.

Breaking into it is designed to be impossible for normal people. But  
not harder than building a shuttle, or figuring out how to put a rover  
on Mars. The agency hires people with the ability to find solutions  
for intimidatingly large problems exactly like this one. In this  
regard, Roberts was your typical NASA intern. The 25-year-old was  
pursuing multiple degrees in Physics, Geology and Anthropology. But  
while Thad was school smart, he also has an almost unquencheable  
adrenaline-seeking side, and was consumed with a strange Excel  
spreadsheet of personal goals that read like he was trying to prove  
himself to Evel Knievel and a rocket scientist at the same time:  
Experience zero gravity, check; experience severe dehydration, check;  
find dinosaur tracks, no problem. The list was long, and as he checked  
off one after another, maybe Thad's ego began to believe anything was  
possible.

But Thad wasn't in this alone. He was on his way to a divorce fueled  
by an affair he was having with fellow intern Tiffany Fowler. Tiffany  
was equally dynamic—a firecracker and former cheerleader who spoke  
French in bed and conducted stem cell research on NASA's behalf. Thad  
wanted her, so when Tiffany begged to hear his idea to liberate the  
moon rocks, he told her. And when she wanted to follow through with  
the plan, the romantic and exciting thing was to start hatching a plan  
as if it were yet another science problem at work. One that would  
could make them very rich, or ruin their lives.

Soon one more curious co-op, the 19-year-old Shae Saur, had joined in  
on the heist. After months of preparation, they found themselves  
embarking on their unauthorized mission, driving for Building 31 North  
after dark with intel on every security device—and plans to get around  
them.


When it comes to Thad's story, it is worth noting several things. I  
was not allowed to quote him directly from my interviews, and the  
others involved in the crime declined to verify his facts. This is his  
story as he told it to me. And in the time since, he's written a novel  
about the heist, which was "based on truth, but it's embellished." So,  
take the tale for what it's worth.

The Space Center had been under 24-hour supervision since the 9/11  
attacks, but the guards planted at each entryway are not in the habit  
of stopping NASA's carefully selected interns—who are always working— 
from entering after hours.

The guard said, "You get a new car?"

Thad replied, "No, sir. Borrowed it to help a friend move."

So with a wave of a hand, Shae, Tiffany and Thad were granted access.  
Thad guided the Jeep Cherokee on the short journey past Rocket Park—an  
open sky cemetery of former rockets and spacecraft—then parked near  
the entryway of Building 31.

Once they were in range, the three set about linking and looping the  
cameras inside Building 31, a system that they had previously taped  
between shifts of employees responsible for watching the cameras. It  
is unknown how Thad and company received the intel required to do such  
a thing, even if the idea itself is straight out of a heist flick. But  
Shae stayed in the car to monitor the rewired cameras, to warn Tiffany  
and Thad if anything went wrong. While they prepped, they watched for  
the presence of fellow late night co-workers, but Thad timed their  
arrival well and they are alone. So far so good. Thad and Tiffany  
crawled out of the Jeep, grabbed their duffel bags, and headed for the  
entryway. Getting inside the front door was easy—a former coworker had  
simply emailed Thad the code that would allow them access. Inside jobs  
are often like this, but NASA doesn't make it easy to steal moon rocks— 
the puzzle was only starting to get complicated.

Inside the building, an unassuming university-like structure formed by  
blocks and filled with sterile white walls, Thad and Tiffany walked  
down well-lit hallways. The milky corridors, warmed by picture shrines  
to missions past, form the passageway between the offices of full time  
NASA employees, as well as the route to the inner sanctum of Building  
31 North. They stopped to prepare.

In the bathroom, when Thad and Tiffany put on their wetsuits, they  
also stopped to check their breathing apparatus. The moon rocks were  
in a chamber devoid of oxygen in order to keep the rocks from rotting  
by oxidation. They would have 15 minutes of air supplied from their  
tanks once they entered the nitrogen-filled chamber, past the airlock.

If the interior of Building 31 can be described as white, then the  
interior of Building 31 North can be described as bleached—immaculate  
and bloodless in a wash of round-the-clock sterility. During the day,  
the single lab inside the pearly building buzzes with the movement of  
white jackets occupied by some of the biggest brains in the world. But  
at night, once the scientists have passed through the clean room that  
guards their entries and exits, the lab is nothing but white surfaces,  
cold metal, glass panels and the unearthly presence of nitrogen tanks.  
Thad and Tiffany's path took them straight through clean room and  
across the empty laboratory, leaving them at the edge of a short hall  
that dead-ended at the door to the vault.

Breaking into the actual vault required a complex series of codes,  
some of which were cracked using a dusting of calcite, fluorite and  
gypsum powder. The mix of the three glows under blacklight, and by  
paying careful attention to the absorption of the powder it is  
possible to tell which finger came down first and so forth. It doesn't  
quite make sense that Thad could use this trick to figure out the  
exact sequence for all the codes, based off such rudimentary  
information. But once Thad had eventually thrown his whole weight  
against the vault door, the two were inside.

The vault itself was much like the laboratory, a big room in which  
core samples and moon rocks are encased in glass and metal, numbered  
by mission. But they hadn't the time to admire their surroundings. To  
stay on track—or more importantly, to stay alive—Thad and Tiffany had  
only 3 minutes to crack the safe, or they wouldn't have enough air to  
get back outside.

As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code,  
so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe  
from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back  
out to the car. It wasn't easy, but within the remaining time allotted  
to them, the two managed to slip out of the vault, through the  
laboratory, down the hallways, past the rooms, through the doors and  
out of the grounds undetected—all while dragging over a quarter ton of  
rocks and metal. No small feat, and I'm unsure of how, even on a  
dolly, a man and a woman could have moved it all.

NASA didn't realize the safe was gone for two days. A list of suspects  
was slowly put together. There were no clues left behind—not a  
fingerprint, a piece of hair, nothing—so the resulting set of names  
(which was void of that of the actual culprits) looked more like a  
compiled NASA shitlist than anything else.

The samples they took were from every Apollo mission, ever. Sometime  
between the heist and its resolution, Tiffany and Thad arranged the  
moon rocks on a bed—and had sex amongst them.

********

Typically, the life of NASA terrestrial moon rocks is dull. After  
reams of paperwork get approved, a small fragment of the rock makes  
its way out of this building and into the hands of a researcher, who  
for a period of time can coax the moon to give up its secrets.  
However, when the researcher's time is up, the rock must be returned  
to the safekeeping of its disaster-proof home, but now permanently  
compromised by the prods and chemical dousings that so rarely result  
in something worth talking about.

By this point, the rock is considered too tainted for further use, but  
is subjected nonetheless to the same eager security as the rest of the  
contents of 31 North. The rocks, never to be touched again, go in the  
safe that Thad stole, which is kept inside the same vault where the  
untested moon rocks rest behind glass panels in a heavily monitored,  
oxygen-free climate to simulate the moon.

It is worth noting that at any point in the vault, Thad or Tiffany  
could have used glasscutters to get to the untouched moon rocks behind  
a panel, but stole the much more difficult to carry safe instead. Why?

There is significant frustration among NASA employees regarding the  
tested rocks. Tainted as they may be, many feel they deserve to be at  
least on display. Perhaps most irritatingly, they present an obvious  
answer to NASA's funding issues. Science's trash can be a collector's  
treasure, and the price on a piece of the moon, chemical-laden or  
otherwise, mirrors that of any other intergalactic relic. For these  
reasons, conversations about these stored rocks are as common on the  
grounds of the Johnson Space Center as the solving of more everyday  
astronautical problems. And NASA employees like to solve problems. To  
Thad Roberts, the problem of the underutilized-but-valuable moon rocks  
had a simple answer. He told me that if they were useless to science,  
he saw no harm in stealing them. And the fact he stole the safe, not  
the more easily taken fresh rocks, seems to back this up.

On the other hand, the FBI's case files contradicts this notion:

...they also contaminated them—making them virtually useless to the  
scientific community. They also destroyed three decades worth of  
handwritten research notes by a NASA scientist that had been locked in  
the safe.

Who do you trust less, a convicted thief, or the US government?

The story, however, does not end here.

********

Gordon McWhorter, a friend of Thad's who was largely unaware of the  
magnitude of the heist, had helped to find a buyer for the rocks,  
across the internet.

Greetings.

My name is Orb Robinson from Tampa, Fla. I have in my possession a  
rare and multi-karat moon rock I'm trying to find a buyer for. The  
laws surrounding this type of exchange are known, so I will be  
straightforward and nonchalant about wanting to find a private buyer.  
If you, or someone you know would be interested in such an exchange,  
please let me know.

Thanks.

A Belgian amateur mineralogist by the name of Axel Emmermann had been  
coveting moon rocks as an addition to his unusual collection.  
Emmermann wanted the rocks if the price was right, and Thad had priced  
a quarter pound of moon far, far under NASA's post-crime estimate of  
over $30 million. The price was so right, in fact, that Emmermann grew  
suspicious, and worried that the deal might be less black and white  
than it seemed.

On July 20, 2002—exactly 33 years to the day after the day that  
Armstrong first stepped on the moon—"Emmermann" met Thad in a Florida  
restaurant. They chatted, then headed for a hotel where the official  
swap was to take place. They all stepped out of the car. The Orlando  
Sentinel reported that Roberts joked, "I'm just hoping you don't have  
a wire on you." He was. The person Thad thought was Emmermann was  
actually an FBI agent.
In moments, 40 agents, 40 guns and the sound of a helicopter overhead  
surrounded them. The freeway had even been shut down in case of  
escape. They'd been made.

Tiffany and Thad were in a holding cell together for 24 hours, but  
that was the last time they'd be together until the sentencing date.

In court, Thad looked back at her from his seat in the courtroom;  
Tiffany looked down at her feet.

The punishments were doled out in unfair, interesting packages. Both  
of the girls were simply handed probation, but the boys were both  
dealt several years. Gordon was served nearly as harshly as Thad, who  
received 100 months for his planning, execution of the crime (a  
sentence that was later reduced). As if all of this wasn't enough,  
Thad was also brought up on charges of stealing dinosaur fossils from  
a dig site in Utah. The case was folded into this one.

Thad spent his time in prison doing things befitting of an ex-NASA co- 
op, like teaching his inmates about quantum physics, but also spent a  
good deal of time mourning the loss of Tiffany. On August 4th, 2008,  
when his sentence was finished, he was dismayed to learn she had moved  
on. By that point, however, he had another thing in his possession, a  
completed book entitled Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing an Eleven- 
Dimensional Framework of Nature, An Introduction to Quantum Space  
Theory. That says that the book covers Einstein's theories of truth,  
the rational complete form of nature, and the interplay of the seen  
and the unseen. It has yet to be published.

There are rumors of unsolved mysteries. Supposedly, two significant  
pieces of NASA history went missing during the time of the crime, and  
have not been recovered: The original video tapes of the 1969 Lunar  
Landing, and six folders of more mysterious content that were  
supposedly stored in the safe. Thad claims to have never seen them.

Carmel Hagen serves as editor at realtime search engine OneRiot, where  
she guzzles Bawls energy drink and chucks empty bottles at PCs. In her  
spare time she sleeps, explores San Francisco, and writes for a solid  
mix of urban culture, trendsetting and tech publications.
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