Hutchinson ? Several former astronauts are collecting money to pay legal expenses for Max Ary, the former Cosmosphere director convicted of stealing artifacts from the museum. Thomas Stafford, Eugene Cernan and Wally Schirra have set up a Web site to accept donations.

A federal jury in November found Ary, the former president and chief executive officer of the Hutchinson space museum, guilty of 12 counts that included theft of government property, wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering.

Ary has accumulated more than $500,000 in expenses related to his trial, according to a statement on the Web site.

“Gen. (Tom) Stafford, who is a client of mine and one of the astronauts in the state of Oklahoma, was instrumental in concluding that we ought to do this to assist Max,” said Walter Hammert, a certified public accountant in Oklahoma City.

“We do anticipate additional astronauts will be contributing because we feel very strongly about this down here, and we think it has been a gross miscarriage of justice for the judicial system to do what they have done to Max Ary,” Hammert said.

Prosecutors claimed Ary stole items that belonged to NASA and the Cosmosphere and profited by selling them.

Ary acknowledged he sold items that belonged to NASA and the Cosmosphere but said it was a mistake – that the artifacts had accidentally been intermingled with items in his own collection.