Moon investment reaps rewards

Privately owned Soviet lunar vehicle is found after decades lost in space

In 1993, the game designer, adventurer and space explorer Richard Garriott rather eccentrically placed a bid on a Soviet Lunar Rover at a space memorabilia collectibles auction. Peculiar purchase? Perhaps. But not as peculiar as the location of the rover, which was at the time lost somewhere on the vast expanse of the moon’s surface.

Now, decades after the anomalous investment, Garriott’s passion for space memorabilia has paid-off, and he is eager to recoup his interplanetary flutter. The lunar rover, once a cog in the machine of the Soviet Union’s ‘space race’ with the US, has now been discovered, years after it ‘disappeared’.

Garriott maintains, tongue-in-cheek, that parts of the moon explored by the rover arguably belong to him. To put his claims into perspective, large swathes of the lunar surface have previously been sold to bidders by dubious organisations such as ‘The Lunar Embassy’.

According to Garriott, the rover has travelled around 40km on the lunar surface, which translates to roughly 10,000 acres. Whether or not his claims are valid, Garriott remains the only private owner of an object on a celestial body.

The adventurer’s achievements are not restricted to his impressive cache of memorabilia - his mission as the sixth private space explorer included a trip to the International Space Station and a spacewalk, making him the first private individual to do so.