MOON ROCKERS: Four people have been arrested for stealing moon rocks from Johnson Space Center.

The natural response to this is outrage that someone would even think of doing this -- after all, these are materials of nearly holy relic status. How could they do this?

The real question should be: how could they do this? Sure, no security system is as tight as its operators would like you to believe, but still...wouldn't you expect the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (or whatever it is called nowadays) to just maybe be under just a little bit tighter security than the rest of JSC? It makes you wonder what someone else, with similar access but motivated by malevolence rather than greed, could have accomplished...especially in light of the upcoming (someday) launch of the first Israeli astronaut.

On the other hand, one ought to think about just why someone would be willing to pay $1000/gram for, well, dirt...something that should be as common and cheap as souvenir black sand from Hawaii. The stuff is the target of theives and could fetch such a ridiculous price (around a hundred times its weight in gold) precisely because there is so little of it available on Earth. And that is so, because we have yet to return to the Moon. After all, who in their right mind would pay $1000/gram for lunar rock when they could instead pay half as much for a ticket to Clavius Base, where they could scoop up a ten pound bag of the stuff for free while enjoying a long weekend at the Space Spa?