Terry Goodrich wrote:


I was just wondering, we have a 10~20 gram stone worth 5 million. Surely
someone could design a robot to go to the moon and pick up 20 kilo of rock
(pebbles, dirt, etc. it probably wouldn't matter). Assuming that the value
of the rocks would decrease in value as much as 90% due to the fact that
they would be on the open market, 20 kilo of rocks could be worth as much as
500 million dollars. One should be able to build and launch a probe for
that much.


I now have a sneaking suspicion about that Chinese lunar sample return
mission.... :-)

Pat