Sex On The Moon: Inside NASA’s Most Unusual $21 Million Heist

In July 2002, 24-year-old NASA intern Thad Roberts — a triple major in physics, geology, and geophysics at the University of Utah — carried out one of NASA’s most audacious thefts.

Struggling financially and supporting a wife back home, Roberts devised what he believed was a foolproof plan: steal a 600-pound safe from Houston’s Johnson Space Center containing lunar samples from every Apollo mission and a meteorite, together valued at $21 million, according to the NY Post.

His first step was finding a buyer. With help from friend Gordon McWhorter, Roberts connected online with a Belgian interested in paying $1,000–$5,000 per gram. The buyer, however, alerted the FBI, which told him to keep talking while agents investigated.

Around this time, Roberts began a whirlwind romance with 22-year-old NASA intern Tiffany Fowler. After just three weeks of dating, Roberts told her about the plan — and she agreed to help. They recruited another intern, Shae Saur, and one night used their NASA IDs to slip into the lab and wheel out the entire safe.

The NY Post writes that at a hotel, they sawed it open. On July 20, the 33rd anniversary of the first moon landing, Roberts and Fowler drove to Orlando to meet associates of the “buyer.” While waiting, Roberts hid moon rocks under the bed covers.

“I take some of the moon rocks and I put them underneath the blanket on the bed … I never said anything but I’m sure she could feel it,” he told CBS News in 2012. “It was more about the symbol of what we were doing, basically having sex on the moon. It’s more uncomfortable than not, but it wasn’t about the comfort at that point. It was about the expression. And no one had ever had sex on the moon before. I think we can safely say that.”

When the meeting came, it wasn’t buyers waiting — it was undercover FBI agents. The rocks were recovered, but the FBI said they were now “virtually useless to the scientific community,” and the theft also destroyed 30 years of a NASA scientist’s handwritten research notes.

After his arrest, Roberts admitted to also stealing dinosaur bones and fossils from the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City. “We weren’t going to take this money we were getting from it to go buy a yacht or lots of cars or a big house,” he told CBS. “We were gonna live just the small kind of lifestyle we were, but fund science that might change the world, you know?”

Roberts, Fowler, and Saur pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit theft and interstate transportation of stolen property. Roberts got eight years in federal prison, serving six; Fowler and Saur each received 180 days of house arrest and 150 hours of community service. McWhorter, convicted at trial, was sentenced to six years. Roberts and Fowler never saw each other again.