Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History, by Ben Mezrich

Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History
By Ben Mezrich
Doubleday
Four Stars
Reviewed by Jessica Gribble

How many boyfriends have promised their girlfriends the moon? And how many have been able to deliver? In this true story that reads like a novel, Thad Roberts, a fellow at the Johnson Space Center, steals a safe of moon rocks, planning to sell some of the contents to fund his scientific career and his dream life with his new girlfriend.

Thad grows up Mormon. When, on the eve of his mission training, he admits that he’s had sex, the church kicks him out and his parents disown him. A sheltered, naïve kid, he’s forced to grow up fast. He marries his girlfriend and starts college. When he decides to become an astronaut, he takes the bull by the horns, majoring in geology, physics, and anthropology. He founds the Utah Astronomical Society, volunteers on paleontology digs, gets his pilot’s license, takes Russian and Japanese, and completes a charity bike ride from Salt Lake City to San Francisco. He becomes the perfect candidate for the prestigious Johnson Space Center co-op program.

When Thad gets to Houston, he suddenly realizes he can become anyone he wants—and he wants to be noticed. So he changes personality. He impresses prestigious scientists. He proposes a challenge at a pool party: the co-ops will report each week on the “coolest” thing they’ve been able to get away with. When Thad manages to sneak onto the Space Shuttle Simulator, his status as daredevil ringleader is cemented. He leads weekend excursions: sleeping under the stars, skinny dipping with a new confidant, Sandra. When on a cliff-diving trip he meets Rebecca, everything changes. He loves her immediately. And his already-conceived plan—to steal moon rocks that NASA considers trash, although they’re illegal for citizens to possess—begins to sound like the way to show Rebecca the heights of his love.

The story gets more exciting as various characters enter the plot, including Sandra and Rebecca. Thad’s stoner acquaintance Gordon helps him research possible buyers. Axel Emmermann, a Belgian rock hound, decides the offer is not a hoax and alerts the FBI. The plans for the theft are made while the government tries to follow the crime in progress. The book becomes a fast-paced thriller.

However, despite the interesting plot, I found Thad utterly unlikeable. His bravado hid a wounded soul, but there were too few glimpses of vulnerability or any sense of the consequences for people he supposedly cared about. Criminals are always unlikeable, in a way, but authorial skill and choices can make them complex, even sympathetic (see Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song). If the author had been more adept, he would have avoided clichés like “He caught a sharp whiff of her floral perfume, the briefest taste of her citrus shampoo from an errant strand of her short hair—and then she was gone, over the edge.”

The smartest authorial choice Ben Mezrich (bestselling author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires—which were made into the movies 21 and The Social Network) makes is to keep telling the story after Thad is caught in the government’s sting operation. In fact, Thad becomes much easier to like once he’s in prison. Some of his megalomania erodes, and you get the sense that he’s sorry he made the decisions he made—or at least sorry he got caught. For a real-time follow-up to Sex on the Moon, readers can visit the website for Thad’s prison book project, called Einstein’s Intuition: Quantum Space Theory. In his bio, we read that “though he would never repeat those actions, Thad says that he doesn’t regret how things turned out.”