Martian 1909 VDB

Factor the cost of recovery into the coin's cost. If you can recover it, you own it. 10K seems on the low side if you were going to sell it.

As for the only Lincoln in space, I would doubt it. Throughout the space program there have been reports of astronauts bring/smuggling all sorts of stuff into space so that they can sell it later.

Yeah, I thought of all the smuggled coins too. But this is the difference; this one is the ONLY authenticated Lincoln. There are two quarters with one of the extra solar probes, but I can't remember which anytime soon.

But hey...you know...I work in the Space industry...and one day 20 years ago I was walking behind Pete Conrad when he dropped a dime. I picked it up and tried to hand it to him and he said "Keep it, I went to the Moon with a handfull of those". . It is easy to see the difference that documentation makes on something like that.

Theres no way that coin would have the slightest bit of trouble fetching 10k. Personally I think that coin would hit 6 figures minimum just to say you have the only coin from mars and theres not likely to be any more anytime soon. Items like that will get even non collectors interested in the bidding

Remember now, though the coin does exist, this was just a what would it bring in a what if scenerio. First I need to get going on my Brussard Ram Jet. I knew that AAE degree would come in handy!

And there was the original post on this forum in February

https://goccf.com/t/110297&SearchTerms=1909,mars

Coins in space are nothing new. There was even an ancient Judaean shekel that went up with the Israeli astronaut on the fateful final flight of Columbia; I never heard if that particular coin was among the recovered debris.

As for the discussion in the OP about he value of the Mars Rover coin, let's put it this way. The rover that it is attached to is not intended to make the return trip. So for this coin to "come onto the market", someone is going to have to go there and retrieve it. We don't have the technology to send stuff from Mars to Earth cheaply; any "sample return from Mars" missions anytime in the next century are going to focus on returning actual pieces of Mars to labs on Earth for analysis, rather than pieces of old Earth probes. And if they did want pieces of old probes (to test the effects of long-term exposure to the Martian environment) they'd bring back structural pieces, not collectable trinkets.

You'd pretty much need a large permanent manned base on Mars before anyone has the free time and spare manpower needed to retrieve this coin from this rover. And by the time that happens, souvenirs from space are going to be so "run of the mill" that no-one would want or pay attention to a coin retrieved from an early rover, even if it was the "first coin on Mars".

By that time, the Martian colonists will probably have started making their own coins; the "first coin FROM Mars" would be much more interesting back here. The rover coin may even end up being retrieved in several centuries time by a local coin collector who wants to keep it for his own collection, rather than send it back to Earth.


They'd have given it a good scrub to make sure there weren't any nasty Earth lifeforms on it, so it would grade as "cleaned". And by the time a "coin retrieval mission" could be undertaken, the exposed side of the coin will probably have been sandblasted by Martian dust storms into a near-featureless copper disc.