Featured Image Credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty
A miracle pen that saved Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's lives has been auctioned off at an absolutely mind-boggling price this week.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s 1969 Moon landing is usually remembered for the giant leap, the first footprints and the images that defined the space race.
Far less known is the small piece of stationery that got Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin home, and it has just changed hands for a staggering sum.
After Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the lunar module following their historic moonwalk, Aldrin spotted something worrying on the cabin floor.
Advert
It was a small black switch that had snapped off from the engine-arm circuit breaker. That breaker was needed to send electrical power to the ascent engine, which would lift the two men off the Moon and begin their journey back to Earth.
“My heart jolted a bit," Aldrin recalled in his 2009 autobiography Magnificent Desolation (as shared by The Guardian).
"The broken switch had snapped off from the engine-arm circuit breaker, the one vital breaker needed to send electrical power to the ascent engine that would lift Neil and me off the Moon.”
Aldrin later joked in a letter of provenance provided by Sotheby’s that he and Armstrong never fully agreed on who caused the damage.
“I think Neil broke the switch off and Neil thinks that I broke the switch off," the NASA astronaut wrote. “In the end, what mattered most was that we had to figure out how to solve the problem of the broken switch so that we could leave the lunar surface and get home to Earth.”
The astronauts reported the issue to Mission Control, hoping engineers on Earth could find another way to route power to the ascent engine.
By the following morning, Houston had come back with no way to reroute it. Aldrin considered pressing something into the circuit breaker to make it hold, but he knew he had to be careful.
“I thought that if I could find something in the LM [lunar module] to push into the circuit, it might hold,” the space scientist added in his autobiography. “But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end.”
That was when he remembered a black felt-tip pen he had brought with him as part of his 'personal preference kit,' the small set of personal items astronauts were allowed to take on the mission.
“It wasn’t in the official list of items we took to the moon,” he noted in No Dream Is Too High. “But I now had that pen in the shoulder pocket of my space suit.”
Aldrin described how he used the pen to press into the damaged circuit breaker.
He added: “I gingerly pressed the pen against the engine arm circuit breaker. For a long moment, I didn’t want to remove the tip from the circuit breaker, hoping against hope that it would hold. Slowly, almost reluctantly, I eased the pressure on my hand and lifted the pen’s tip.
“The pen did the trick; the circuit breaker held. We could return to Earth after all!”
That same pen has now been sold at auction in New York for an eye-watering $857,600 (around £630,000). The silver plastic Duro Rocket pen had been expected to sell for between $800,000 and $1.2 million at Sotheby’s. Five bidders reportedly chased the lot before it went to its new owner.
The broken piece of the circuit breaker was also included in the sale, with both items coming directly from Aldrin’s personal collection.
