Bag Buzz’s space communion kit for £200,000
News Reporter
A CLOTH bag in which astronaut Buzz Aldrin carried his lunar “communion kit” has emerged for sale.
He carried out man’s first religious act on the Moon while alone in the mission’s module.
Aldrin read some scripture, ate bread and sipped wine from a chalice before joining Neil Armstrong on the surface 20 minutes later.
His Personal Preference Kit (PPK), in which the items were kept, has been given a price of £200,000. On it, Aldrin wrote: “This lunar module PPK carried my personal belongings to Tranquility Base on Apollo XI. Including communion kit.”
The two astronauts spent almost 22 hours on the Moon before starting the journey back to Earth.
Unpacked
Aldrin, an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, near Houston, recalled communion on July 20, 1969. He said: “Shortly after landing on the Moon, I unpacked the chalice and communion items from the ‘PPK’, laying them and the scripture reading on the little table in front of the abort guidance system computer.
“We did not broadcast the service back to Earth, resulting in the public today being largely unaware of this extraordinary event!
“Instead, I radioed to Earth: ‘Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence’.
“…In the radio blackout, I poured the wine into the chalice and observed how, in the one-sixth lunar gravity, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the cup’s side. Consider that the first liquid ever poured on another world, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements!
“I then read ‘I am the vine, you are the branches.Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me’.” The 6in by 8½in cloth bag was kept by Aldrin for many years before passing to a collector and has a leather Apollo XI folio with its history. US-based RR Auctions, which has a timed auction sale ending on April 16, called the communion service “almost tantamount to the achievement of Aldrin’s first lunar step”. It added: “This is a magnificent symbol of faith from the personal safekeeping of history’s second moonwalker.” Aldrin is 90. Armstrong died, aged 82, in 2012.
Buzz in 1999 with the PPK bag, which contained materials to perform the first religious act on the Moon. Inset, is the Apollo XI leather folio with item’s history