No One Wants to Spend $75,000 on This Piece of the Hubble Telescope

You know what would really tie your living room together? The Hubble Space Telescope's enormous equipment rack and two-person control console.

Hailing from the Hubble's pre-launch days at the Goddard Space Flight Center, this 3,550-pound load of hardware showed up on eBay last year, but nobody has coughed up the $75,000—plus $1,500 for shipping—set by the seller, who goes by the name "itsanamazinglifeforsure."

According to the listing, these two pieces of equipment were used to power the Hubble while it was undergoing tests at Goddard's Thermal Vacuum Chamber Facility in the 1980s. From 1984 to 1990, the rack and console helped ready the batteries and solar panels of the spacecraft for flight, and the lot comes with two operation logs to prove it. Anyone who ponies up the cash for these antique items will be able to read entries beginning on June 7, 1984, when the equipment was first used.

It's tempting to shell out for a piece of NASA history, but the price tag has proved too high for even the most devoted space enthusiasts. Indeed, the seller's transaction history indicates that he or she already tried to offload the rack by itself in 2012 for $75,000, and only threw in the console as a freebie in 2013. The market for antiquated Hubble test equipment must just be in a slump recently.

That said, this seller also has a wide selection of more reasonably priced NASA throwbacks, including a rad 1982 Johnson Space Center computer for $750, some sweet spacecraft test gloves for $19.99, and what can only be described as a NASA mystery box of some kind, for $49.00.

Maybe this latest attempt to offload the rack and console will be more successful for the seller than it has been over the last two and a half years. It would certainly be a good fit for anyone eager to give their home a little taste of "thermovac chic."