The Right Stuff Goes for Astronomical Prices At the Giant Outer Space Garage Sale
Posted by Brian_Anderson on Tuesday, Jul 12, 2011
Above: An auction of space suits and other Apollo related items in New York in May.
In all likelihood you’ll never get blasted into outer space. Get over it. Until privatized space flight lifts off and ages out of the roughly $200,000-per-cruise early-adopter phase, one of your best cracks at experiencing the cold, hard void is to do so vicariously, through the cold, hard stuff that’s actually been there.
If you’ve got a guy at NASA, or your guy knows a guy at NASA, you might have a good chance of getting a hold of space souvenirs – and landing in jail too. Snatching “flown” or decommissioned materials happens often at NASA, but it’s most often illegal, as this recent moon dust-up and NASA’s lawsuit against a moon-camera-selling astronaut remind us.
That means that your only real, legal shot is to bid on whatever souvenirs make it to auction blocks.
The Falcon lunar module’s Attitude Control joystick from Apollo 15 sold at auction for £206,000.
This past weekend in Los Angeles hundreds of lots of space and aviation collectibles – everything from the Mercury Program’s prestigious 1962 Collier Trophy to the full heatshield plug from Skylab III (happy Reentry Day, btw) to mission checklists from STS-51-L, better known as the doomed 1986 Challenger mission – were auctioned off by numismatists Ira and Larry Goldberg.
The strip cut from Apollo 11’s Old Glory – arguably the most viewed American flag in history – didn’t sell. That particular nylon swatch never actually flew, as it was cut from the flag to better fit the iconic sheet onto the telescoping tube that was then driven into lunar soil. The strip is signed by Neil Armstrong, but earning only $60,000 over this weekend the item fell short of a $95,000 minimum house reserve price.
Timed to coincide with the final Shuttle launch, of course, the mass sell-off netted a non-finalized estimate of over $350,000 from what were likely clamoring hoards of collectors looking to complete that obscure, unofficial 1983 STS-8 crew patch set, say, before prices go astronomical (sorry).
Goodbye Shuttle, Hello Shuttle Parts
What the end of the Shuttle era does, as collectspace.com’s Robert Pearlman tells the Statesman Journal, is boost the values of flown and non-flown items alike, as it provides “a definitive number of shuttle missions and shuttle astronauts.” We’ve got the entire story now, in other words, against which the significance and legitimacy of all manner of parts and mementos can be measured. And just as the Apollo Program’s shuttering in 1973 set the precedent for handling decommissioned space booty – never before had there been much interest in collecting space memorabilia – when Atlantis returns to earth next week we’ll be forced to reconsider our definitions of what’s special and what’s scrap.
James Hull, NASA’s manager of exhibits and artifacts, says everything related to a Shuttle is subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, whose artifact-transfer process entails buyers (museums, academic institutions) pledge to not sell the goods for a minimum of five years. That includes everything from the shuttle tiles that are being shipped at $23 a piece to the entire orbiters, like the one that’s bound for New York City, provided that it can pay the $30 million shipping bill.
This t-shirt was probably not flown in space.
Given that we’re closing the Shuttle chapter with nothing queued up for NASA’s imminent future, anything associated with the era, right down to the unsexy bulk materials like nuts and bolts, bins and sheet metal, may soon be scratched and clawed over. “I would suspect that five to seven years from now you’ll see a lot of stuff legitimately going up for sale,” Hull says. After Atlantis gets switched off one last time, “we’re going to be dispositioning so many things it’s unbelievable.”
Better start saving now.
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Drones. Drugs. Internet. Noise. Motherboard long-form desk. Brooklyn by way of Chicago. brian@motherboard.tv @thebanderson
