[GreenKeys] expensive surplus

[Henry Minsky]

In the 1970's my father would go to the Massachusetts state surplus warehouse
in Taunton, MA, to get stuff for his lab at MIT, or just for the fun of it. 
We had stuff
like a titanium ICBM nose cone in our backyard, used as a picnic table,
  and some giant magnesium struts which were originally to be used for parts
of the Lunar lander.

The stuff at the warehouse was tagged with the original government cost. 
One day there
was a nice looking item in the warehouse, which said "Lunar X-Ray 
Spectrometer, government cost $2,000,000". It looked very much like 
something made to be taken to the moon, it was covered in
gold-mylar foil layers, and looked very nice. So my dad bought it for $250 
or so.  It sat in our garage for a year or so, and then NASA called saying 
they were looking for it and really wanted it back.

It turned out that it was a backup  working copy of one that was sent to 
the moon, and it had been
shipped to NBC to show on a news program with Walter Cronkite, and then 
they had lost track of it.