Some guys buy flowers. Thad Roberts decided to steal a piece of the moon instead. In the summer of 2002, Roberts was a 25-year-old intern at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a triple major in physics, geology and geophysics who’d spent his college years founding an astronomy club and dreaming, quite literally, of becoming an astronaut. Then he met Tiffany Fowler, another NASA intern working in a stem-cell lab. Three weeks into dating her, Roberts had already moved in with her. And somewhere in that stretch, he landed on an idea that no romance novel would have dared write: he’d give her the moon. Not figuratively. Actual moon.
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Nasa Interns Stole Moon Rock Late one night in July 2002, Roberts, Fowler and a third intern named Shae Saur slipped into a secure lab at Johnson Space Center using their real NASA badges. They wore neoprene wetsuits to dodge the room’s thermal alarms and rerouted the security cameras before making their move. Inside sat a 600-pound safe holding decades of lunar history, samples collected across every Apollo mission from 1969 to 1972, along with a rare Martian meteorite.
They didn’t crack the safe. They carried the whole thing out. By the time NASA staff noticed something was missing, the trio was long gone, and so was roughly 17 pounds of material that would later be valued at $21 million.
Romance on the Moon: What Happened at the Hotel Here’s the part that turned a federal theft case into a story people still can’t stop repeating: before the rocks were ever sold, or even hidden properly, Roberts and Fowler took them to a hotel room. And then, according to Roberts’ own later retelling, he slid a handful of the lunar samples under the blanket, right there on the bed.
He’s since described it, half-joking, half-serious, as something no one else on Earth could claim, a night spent with actual pieces of the moon between the sheets. Whether you find that romantic or borderline unhinged probably depends on how forgiving you’re feeling about federal property theft.
The timing made the episode even stranger. July 20, 2002, was the 33rd anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s historic Apollo 11 Moon landing. Roberts and Fowler were in Orlando with the stolen samples, expecting to complete the sale.
Instead, Roberts c
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