11 Mar
2013
11 Mar
'13
10:29 p.m.
mc68010 wrote:
I think a case could be made that these are government
property
I don't think a case can be made for that without digging up actual
records. At this point the government would need to prove that it is
their property.
and really were never meant to be sold.
Irrelevant. The government buys billions of dollars of stuff every year
that is "never meant to be sold", and eventually it all gets sold,
unless it's classified, in which case it is declassified then sold or
scrapped. (Sometimes after declassification there's no value other than
as recyclable materials.)
Even if it could be shown that they didn't explicitly intend to sell it,
they would also have to show that it wasn't abandoned, since abandoning
property with no demonstrable intent to recover it forfeits ownership.
If NASA decided they wanted them back I imagine they
could be taken back.
Not likely. NASA surplused by public auction an incredible amount of
stuff from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. There's no reason
to believe that this wasn't legitimately surplused.
If this particular artifact was a test article or otherwise intended for
purposes other than being a flight article, then there's definitely no
reason it wouldn't have been sold.
The probability that this particular artifact actually flew is so
vanishingly small that it can be completely discounted. The probability
that it was flight-ready is small but nontrivial. Most likely it was a
test article intended for ground use only.