After reading the report, the NASA SWAT team is specifically an emergency response team for major incidents that happen at Kennedy Space Center. It's not some roving security team patrolling landing sites, etc. It makes sense to me that a highly important site like the KSC would want to have a specialized emergency response team, and KSC doesn't exactly have a large city nearby or anything like that that could provide such ERT, so it makes sense that NASA created their own.

I suspect that's the case for most of these other "unusual" SWAT teams in the article. The Department of Interior's SWAT team, for example, is part of the US Park Police and provides ERT responsibilities for highly visible national monuments, like the Statue of Liberty or Washington Monument. The HHS SWAT team is the ERT for the NIH campus in Maryland, etc.

A SWAT team used to raid the homes of widowed astronaut wives to steal back family heirlooms from the Moon.

(I kid you not; google it.)

This one?

quote: NASA investigators then arranged the sting, where Conley met with Davis and her current husband at the Denny's restaurant at Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.

Soon after settling into a booth, Davis said, she pulled out the moon sample and about half a dozen sheriff's deputies and NASA investigators rushed into the eatery. /quote https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/granny-roughed-up-in-moon-rock...

There’s more than one case.

It’s a bit off to call it a “sting” though when the NASA inspector general is the only one that thinks a crime is actually taking place.

Edit: to be clear, the IG is asserting in these cases either that the astronauts stole NASA property or that they illegally profited off of the mission (as later Apollo astronauts got in trouble for doing when they sold the personal effects they took with them).

However in most of these cases it’s clear that (1) these weren’t misplaced samples, but rather an extra rock they picked up and kept, for which there’s no law against; and (2) they didn’t profit off it, but rather freely gave chips of the rock to their wives, girlfriends, children, close friends, or just kept as a momento.

Now two generations later these Apollo era people are dying off and their estate is finding out that the little moon rock grandpa has is worth $10k/gram at auction, and trying to cash in. And when they do, NASA sends a SWAT team to their house.