The trainers made of meteorite that cost £10,000 – and the other space collectables that are out of this world and up for auction

What do you buy for the man who has everything? Part of the cosmos is a good starting point.

How much does a small iron ball that formed in the molten core of an asteroid 4.4 billion years ago cost? Or Libyan ‘desert glass’ that was formed 29 million years ago when a comet struck Earth’s prehistoric dunes?

From Christie’s auction halls to Ebay dealers, the market for meteors is booming as auction records continue to fall.

Elon Musk, Steven Spielberg, Nicolas Cage, Yo-Yo Ma, Uri Geller and James Taylor are among the A-listers who have splashed fortunes on hunks of heaven.

The crypto crowd goes wild on glittering pallasite starbursts, laced with winking yellow ‘space gems’, or curved obsidian lumps of cosmic iron, baked beneath a tortured ‘fusion crust’ carved by the heat of atmospheric intrusion that reaches a white-hot 1,800. degrees Celsius.

A piece of meteorite proven to have fallen from the moon can fetch between £180,000 and £250,000.

The most valuable ever recorded, a specimen of the monolithic Fukang meteorite, found in a mountainous area of ​​China in 2000, sold last year for £525,000. And the market is only getting crazier.

A tin dog kennel that was hit by a meteorite in Costa Rica in 2019 sold for £220,000 (the dog, a German shepherd, was unharmed).

Chips from the Seymchan meteorite, found in Russia in 1967, containing semi-precious amber olivine embedded in glittering iron-nickel metallic crystals, were fitted into the design of a New Balance shoe by Manchester-based sneaker designer Matt Burgess and sold at auction for £ 10,000 (it was commissioned by Netflix to celebrate the release of the Hollywood film Don’t Look Up).

“It’s stunning,” says Burgess. The meteorite in question had been hurtling through space for 4.5 billion years. “You can’t fathom that amount of time.”

Think about it: the oldest thing in the universe sparkles on a blingtastic trainer.

“They’re wonderful gifts,” said Mitch HunterScullion, CEO of London-based Asteroid Mining Corporation, a technology start-up that acquires and analyzes meteors to make claims on their asteroids in deep space, in the hope that one day we ‘I will send missiles to mine them.

They have spent more than £10,000 on meteorites in the past two years, and Hunter-Scullion is happy to hand out cheaper samples to friends, business associates and, in one case, his girlfriend’s former boss as a parting gift. It’s certainly better than a bottle of wine.

“If you give someone a meteorite, he or she will think about space, asteroids and their position on the planet compared to the entire solar system around them,” Hunter-Scullion says.

‘How it is a dynamic place. That out of sight, behind the clouds, much more is happening than they probably had in mind. I think this leads to people knowing their place in things. That’s why I love meteorites.’ (I asked the former boss about the alien gift: she lost it.)

Prices fluctuate enormously. Take the fireball that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013, and buried itself like hail over miles of frozen countryside, perhaps the alien event of the century: a blast of air thirty times brighter than the sun that radiates a distance of 200 km shattered, causing an explosion. shock wave that went around the Earth twice.

Google it to witness astonishing dashboard camera footage of the incident, above a city going about its daily business; 1,100 people were injured, most from broken glass, some from ultraviolet burns and temporary flash blindness.

Christie’s sold a fragment about the size of a pepper shaker for £11,250.

Alternatively, you can buy what appears to be a piece on Ebay for just £7.97 (or a crushed meteorite – a thimble full of stardust – for £4 to £10). Demand exceeds supply, which is why so many frauds (known in the trade as ‘meteor-wrongs’) plague the market.

Meteorite hunters catch only eight to ten new traps per year, and these vanishingly rare catches shatter and scatter like fragments of the True Cross. Small miracle. Space has rarely felt closer.

Commercial corporations from China and India to Russia and the West are pushing humanity’s greedy grip in a way not seen since the Cold War.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX aims to launch 100 rockets this year, after blasting one of its nifty machines into space (and back) once every six days by 2022. And emerging markets are creating new, ultra-wealthy hobbyists.

Naveen Jain, an Indian billionaire who is trying to build spacecraft to mine gold and platinum on the moon, has amassed the largest private meteorite collection on Earth, worth more than £3.6 million. (He only collects meteorites that someone has seen streaking through the atmosphere, known as “witness falls.”)

Cyberspace nerds also play a role. “Another reason why the market has exploded, we noticed during the lockdown, is that a lot of crypto customers were coming to meteorites,” says James Hyslop, Christie’s specialist for Science & Natural History, who organizes the auction house’s Deep Impact meteor auctions (in 2015 ). the house raised around £187,000 in meteor sales; three years later that had more than doubled).

And the average age of buyers has fallen. “I think there’s something about the divisibility and rarity of meteorites that appeals to some of that crypto crowd,” Hyslop says.

‘There is a parallel with Bitcoin. “But I also think a lot of people who want to make a killing on crypto just want something real.” See also: the mega-competitive elite looking to blow away their rivals.

“There is a trend among very wealthy collectors to have three or five of the very best specimens, rather than what collectors were looking for 30 years ago, which was a more encyclopedic collection of meteorites,” says Hyslop.

How do you value a space rock? “The diamond industry uses the four Cs: cut, color, clarity and carat, but for meteors I use the four Ss: size, shape, science and story,” says Hyslop.

Double size means double price. Form comes down to its ‘sculptural quality’: does the parabolic curve of a fragment convey the quality of a Henry Moore masterpiece? Does the mangled iron grille remind you of an angular Giacometti?

Then there’s the science: some Martian meteorites have water elements trapped in them; some meteorites predate the formation of the solar system itself and contain the building blocks of life as we know it.

Apart from all the devastation, there is a certain romance in the air that falls on our heads. Stars excite us: no one wants a stalactite.

There are facts I like too: that meteorites can smell like blood (the high iron content), tar, gunpowder or rotten eggs; that the collective weight of every known meteorite is less than the world’s annual gold production; that much of London is made up of meteor impacts (Irongate House in Aldgate is made of rock struck by a meteorite three billion years ago; traces of the impact are visible in black veins on the stone); that they both create and destroy, wiping out the dinosaurs but providing the elements for life on Earth.

Men are not from Mars. But I’d bite your hand off for any part of it.