OK, the book is not as salacious as the title would suggest, and the subtitle fills you in: "The Amazing Story of the Most Audacious Heist in History." It's author is Ben Mezrich who has written "Bringing down the House" which was a terrific book about a group of MIT students who formed a black jack team to "bring down the house" at various casinos, but ran into some nasty trouble in Las Vegas. It ws made into a good movie called "21" that starred Kevin Spacey. His more recent book was "The Accidental Billionaires" about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, which was made into the really good movie, "The Social Network.""Sex On the Moon" is about a brilliant young student (you sensing a theme here among Mezrich's topics?) named Thad Roberts who secures a three year internship with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He wants to be an astronaut, and he just might have done so, but.... There's always a "but" in stories like this, right? Somewhere along the way, Roberts gets the idea of stealing actual moon rocks from NASA's labs. Moon rocks may well be the most valuable substance on earth considering that there only about 800 pounds of them brought back by the Apollo astronauts, and it's not likely that any more will be arriving on earth in the foreseeable future, if ever.
Why does Roberts do this? Well, a lot of it involves his own insecurities, and, as you might expect, a woman was involved. He literally wanted to "give her the moon."
It's a pretty interesting tale, but I did not find it as compelling a read as "Bringing Down the House", and I confess that I did not read "Accidental Billionaires." I actually found myself feeling sorry for Roberts, a brilliant kid, but a social nerd, and not at all smart enough to see how stupid he was in considering, executing, and (trying to) complete his audacious caper.
Actually, if you just Google "Thad Roberts Moon Rocks" it will give you all you really need to know about the story. Then, you can wait until the movie comes out.
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