Buzz Aldrin's felt-tip pen that saved Apollo 11 sells for $857,600

A dried-out felt-tip marker and a broken circuit breaker switch tip from NASA's Apollo 11 mission sold for a combined $857,600 at Sotheby's on Wednesday. The pen belonged to Buzz Aldrin, who used it to replace a snapped-off ascent engine circuit breaker switch that could have stranded him and Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969. The broken plastic piece was the near-fatal problem; the pen was the improvised fix that saved the mission.

Full text

A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday.

What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to where the two items were 57 years ago—lifting off aboard NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft on humanity's first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. More than flown odds and ends, one was the problem that almost stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, and the other was the simple solution to saving the mission.

"Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?" radioed Aldrin to Mission Control after realizing he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, beginning their trip back to Earth. "The reason I'm asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off. I think we can push it back in again. I'm not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though."

🔥 Hot right now

Buzz Aldrin's felt-tip pen that saved Apollo 11 sells for $857,600

Comments

Comments

You're all caught up

Scroll like on TikTok