Apollo 11 pen and broken switch piece sell for $857,600
A Sotheby’s auction drew a six-figure price for two small Apollo 11 artifacts tied to the crew’s return from the Moon.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
2 min read
A dried-out felt-tip marker and a broken piece of black molded plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday. The price reflected the items’ role in Apollo 11, the NASA mission that first landed astronauts on the Moon 57 years ago.
According to collectSPACE, the two objects were aboard Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and became tied to a problem that threatened the crew’s departure from the lunar surface. One was the damaged part: the top of a circuit breaker switch linked to the ascent engine. The other was the felt-tip pen associated with solving the problem.
The issue arose after Armstrong and Aldrin were on the Moon, collectSPACE reported. Aldrin contacted Mission Control after realizing that the end of the circuit breaker switch had been broken off, raising concern about whether the astronauts could start the ascent engine for the trip back toward Earth.
“Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?” Aldrin radioed, according to the mission exchange cited by collectSPACE. “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.”
The auction result put an extraordinary value on objects that, outside their Apollo 11 history, would appear to be little more than a spent marker and a snapped-off plastic fragment. Their importance comes from their connection to a specific moment in the first crewed lunar landing, when the astronauts had to address a fault involving the switch needed to ignite the ascent engine.
NASA’s Apollo 11 mission carried Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface while Mission Control supported the operation from Earth. The broken switch and the pen are now among the small physical artifacts associated with the mission’s successful return sequence.
Sotheby’s sale underscored the continuing market for flown space memorabilia, especially items tied to Apollo 11. In this case, bidders paid nearly $858,000 for two objects whose value rests on where they were and what they represented during the first human landing on the Moon.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.