While billionaires are battling it out in a race to colonise the moon, mere stratospherically rich mortals on Earth were able to grab a small slice of space rock for themselves on Wednesday at Christie’s annual sale of rare and unusual meteorites.
Star-gazers and meteorite enthusiasts bid frantically for fragments of the “oldest matter humankind can touch” – as the auction house put it – while other objects such as a comet-cracked kennel from Costa Rica sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
A 15g fragment of the Winchcombe meteorite, which briefly became Britain’s most coveted rock after the bright fireball was seen blazing across the sky over the Cotswold town last year, sold for $30,200 (£22,300), while a smaller 1.7g fragment fetched $12,600.
According to the Christie’s catalogue of the 66-lot “Deep Impact: Martian, Lunar and other Rare Meteorites” sale, only 602g of Winchcombe was ever found – with 90% of the material now housed in the UK’s national collection, curated by London’s Natural History Museum.
Among the more usual items for sale was a dog house hit by a meteorite which crashed through the tin roof in April 2019 in Aguas Zarcas, Costa Rica. But while it was expected to sell for as much as $300,000, after all it boasted a seven-inch hole which “marks where the meteorite punctured the roof”, it finally sold for $44,100.
Its resident, a German shepherd named Roky, survived unharmed, according to James Hyslop, head of the science and natural history department at Christie’s.
“My first question when I was offered the dog shed for auction was, ‘Was Roky OK?’,” he told the BBC. “I’m pleased to report that other than now being ‘sans’ dog shed, he’s doing just fine.”
The fragment that caused Roky to lose his home, a shard weighing 178.7g and “covered with fusion crust, the result of its fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere” sold for $21,420 – a snip for an item that consists of “calcium aluminium inclusions– the oldest matter humankind can touch”.
Collecting fireballs from space has attracted the attention of celebrity collectors, who have pushed the price of the rocks tenfold over the past decade. Collectors are thought to include the film director Steven Spielberg; the actor Nicolas Cage; the illusionist Uri Geller; the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; and, inevitably, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX.
A further lot included more than 100 tiny shards from a meteoroid that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 with “an explosive yield estimated to rival that of an atomic bomb”, which sold for $4,788.
