The broken circuit breaker switch that nearly ended Apollo 11, and the pen that saved the crew and the mission. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby’s

That auction is part of Geek Week, which features space memorabilia, meteors, and a 38-foot-long dinosaur skeleton with an estimate as high as $30 million. While dinosaurs tend to dominate the Geek Week headlines—two years ago, Sotheby’s sold a stegosaurus skeleton for $44.6 million—the other two sales, History of Science & Technology and Space Exploration, have their own marquee lots, including a flown Apollo Block II command module pressure hatch from Skylab 3 and the Soviet flag that Aldrin took with him to the moon aboard Apollo 11. (Remember, Nixon made the astronauts bring the flags of more than 100 nations on their journey.) As Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice chairman of science and natural history, told me, the market for space-age relics also has a bizarre backstory—one shaped by legal disputes, shifting ownership laws, and a series of NASA administrative blunders.

For decades, NASA astronauts operated under an informal understanding that certain mission artifacts were theirs to keep. Over the years, many sold flags, checklists, and other mementos that accompanied them on their missions. But the ownership question was never fully settled until 2012, when Congress formally clarified their rights.

The first major flashpoint came in 2011, after Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell consigned to Bonhams a 16mm data acquisition camera that he’d brought back from the moon during his 1971 mission. NASA stepped in to argue that the camera remained government property. The lot was withdrawn. Mitchell eventually surrendered the camera to the government, which transferred it to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The issue reached a boiling point the following year, when NASA questioned the planned Heritage Auctions sale of an Apollo 13 checklist belonging to commander Jim Lovell.

Hatton said that NASA’s attitude shifted once the agency and the Smithsonian started to appreciate the historical significance—and financial value—of the artifacts. “NASA and the Smithsonian realized, ‘Oh my god, these things are super, super valuable historic artifacts. We need to get them back. Why did we let the guys keep these things?’” she told me. “But these astronauts risked their lives and did the most insane thing of basically climbing into a tuna can and being shot off a rocket to the moon knowing they could die. They had regular old salaries. They couldn’t get life insurance. Their retirement sucked, so the stuff they got to keep from their mission was essentially their pensions.”

Congress eventually intervened. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed HR 4158 into law, giving Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts ownership rights over the mission artifacts they had kept for decades. The legislation settled the dispute over objects like checklists, personal equipment, and discarded hardware, but drew a hard line around one category: lunar material. Moon rocks and other samples collected from the lunar surface remain government property and cannot be sold.

The only example of lunar material being legally sold at auction came from the Soviet Union. Three tiny fragments returned by the unmanned Luna-16 mission in 1970 were gifted by the Soviet government to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, the widow of Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program. When Koroleva consigned the samples—weighing just 0.2 grams—to Sotheby’s in 1993, they sold for $442,500 to a private collector.

Brad Palmer, a space specialist at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, told me that the 2012 law “erased any ambiguity” around astronaut-owned artifacts. “Once that happened, they were like, ‘Well, okay, it’s all fair game,’” he said. He said Heritage’s 2019 Neil Armstrong collection represented a turning point for the market, and an introduction to space collecting for people who had never previously considered it.

NASA was never the most fastidious archivist. The Apollo 11 tapes are perhaps the clearest example of how the agency’s own administrative failures helped create scarcity in the space memorabilia market. After the mission, the original recordings of the first moon landing were not treated as priceless historical artifacts. NASA relied on the General Services Administration, the federal agency responsible for the disposal of excess government property, when clearing out old equipment and surplus material. In 1976, a batch of that surplus was sold at auction for just $218. Among the contents were three reels labeled “Apollo 11 EVA,” which a mechanical engineer named Gary George bought—without realizing that he had just acquired the only surviving original recording of the historic mission.

George initially planned to sell the tapes to television stations, which would have erased and reused them. Instead, his father, a space enthusiast, convinced him to keep the reels. More than three decades later, NASA’s search for the missing Apollo 11 recordings led the agency back to George, who discovered he had been unknowingly sitting on one of the most important artifacts in space history. He eventually sold the tapes at Sotheby’s in 2019 for $1.82 million.

The lunar sample bag used by Neil Armstrong during the first moon landing to collect moondust is another example of NASA’s complacency. It was mistakenly transferred out of the agency’s possession, ending up in a government auction decades later. A Chicago-area lawyer, Nancy Lee Carlson, bought it online for $995 without initially realizing its significance. After NASA challenged her ownership in court—and lost—the bag went to Sotheby’s, where it sold for a little more than $1.8 million in 2017.

The legal uncertainty that once surrounded Apollo artifacts has since given way to a more-established market. This year’s Space Exploration sale features objects from 96-year-old Aldrin’s personal collection, including his Apollo 11 flown flag, his lunar module pilot’s checklist, and a signed selfie he took with the curvature of the earth in the background. The auction also includes Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa’s in-flight coverall suit, alongside photographs, medals, and other mission memorabilia.

Buzz Aldrin’s U.S.S.R. flag, flown to the moon on Apollo 11 in, as the Sotheby’s catalogue notes, “the spirit of diplomacy.” Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Hatton said the appeal of these Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo objects comes down to their connection to historic firsts. “It’s not the journey that makes it valuable,” she told me. “It’s the fact that they were the first to do it. You’re buying a piece of history that nobody else can replicate.”

When I asked her who was buying space memorabilia, she said the market is being driven by a mix of younger collectors, people with a personal connection to the space race, and, of course, wealthy tech entrepreneurs. “Silicon Valley–type collectors, but also people who remember watching the Apollo missions as children or had family connections to NASA,” she noted. Whether or not Jeff Bezos—who, in 2013, funded a deep-sea mission to recover Apollo 11’s lost Saturn V engines from the Atlantic Ocean, before donating one to the National Air and Space Museum—bids remains to be seen.

Tranquility Base, photograph signed and inscribed by Buzz Aldrin. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Palmer told me that as NASA’s Artemis program and future commercial missions gather pace, we’re likely to see related memorabilia on the market.  Still, it’s the space-flown artifacts that generate the most interest. “With space-flown artifacts, which are man-made, there is a very finite supply of objects from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions,” Hatton explained.

As the most important Apollo material has gradually entered the market, collectors have begun looking for the next category of space-related objects. “You have to think, like in the art market, when you run out of Old Masters, you look at works on paper or contemporary artists,” she said. “You have to find the next category that excites collectors. Here, meteorites are pretty compelling.”

Thanks, George. I can see that two lots in Sotheby’s sale have already doubled the estimates in presale bidding. So I’m curious to see where this goes next week. In the meantime, I’ll be back on Sunday.

M