Buzz Aldrin has sold two small Apollo 11 artifacts tied to one of the mission’s more alarming hardware failures: a dried-out felt-tip marker and the broken plastic top of a circuit breaker switch. The pair went for $857,600 at a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday, according to collectSPACE.
On paper, the objects sound like desk-drawer debris. Their value comes from where they were 57 years ago: inside NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft during the first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. One item was part of the failure that threatened Neil Armstrong and Aldrin’s departure from the lunar surface. The other was the low-tech workaround that helped get them moving again.
The broken piece came from the circuit breaker associated with the lunar module’s ascent engine. That engine had to fire to lift Armstrong and Aldrin off the Moon and begin their return to Earth. Without a working way to arm or engage that circuit, the mission’s triumphant landing risked turning into a very expensive one-way trip.
Aldrin noticed the damage after he or Armstrong had accidentally broken off the top of the switch, according to the account reported by collectSPACE. He then radioed Mission Control for guidance, asking: “Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?”
He explained the problem in the same transmission: “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.”
A small object with mission-sized consequences
The marker’s appeal at auction is not its elegance. It was a simple felt-tip pen, apparently dried out by the time it reached Sotheby’s. But in the Apollo 11 story, collectSPACE identified it as the practical answer to the broken switch. The pen helped solve the problem of activating the ascent-engine circuit after the switch’s molded black plastic top snapped away.
That is why the auction price makes a kind of grim engineering sense. Spaceflight history often rewards the shiny hardware: capsules, suits, flags, checklists. Here, bidders paid for the opposite: a failed bit of plastic and an improvised tool that mattered because a crew in a hostile place had limited options and no hardware store nearby.
Sotheby’s sale also underlines a recurring truth about crewed spaceflight, one NASA learned in public during Apollo. Complex systems still depend on small parts, and small parts can fail at awkward moments. Armstrong and Aldrin reached the Moon with the backing of a national space program. Their departure, according to this account, involved a felt-tip marker and a broken circuit breaker.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
