SALE STORY
Forty eight years after Neil Armstrong took a great leap for mankind by walking on the moon, his lunar sample bag headlined the first sale of space artefacts to land at Sotheby’s for over 20 years
Forty- eight years since man landed on the Moon, Neil Armstrong’s lunar bag fetched an astronomical sum
Onfirst glance lot 102 didn’t look like the kind of object that would fetch over $1.8m at auction. The small white bag, fastened with a brass zip, measured just 12 by 8½ inches. Inside were visible bits of dust. The only hint towards its significance were the words ‘Lunar Sample Return’ printed along the bottom edge.
The reason that over 500 collectors, curators, members of the public and even a group of high school students were watching the sale at Sotheby’s New York was because this was the bag that Neil Armstrong used to bring back the first samples of lunar material to Earth. The particles inside were remaining fragments of lunar rock. Forty eight years to the day since man first landed on the moon, space enthusiasts and collectors were bidding millions for its dust.
As all other Apollo 11 mission objects are held by America’s Smithsonian Institution, the bag was an exceptionally rare find. Lost for decades, it was not discovered again until 2003 when it was found in the garage of Max Ary, a rogue curator who managed the Cosmosphere space museum in Kansas. Ary, who had been hoarding a number of artefacts, was charged with 36 months in prison. The bag was returned to the US government who mislabelled it as a piece from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.
Bags from Apollo 17 were never used to collect lunar rock and so the bag, when sold by a small auction house on behalf of the US Marshals Service in 2015, went for only $995. The buyer, suspecting that she had bought something significant, sent it for
Forty eight years to the day since man first landed on the moon, space enthusiasts and collectors were bidding millions for its dust
identification at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Here the bag was identified as an original Apollo 11 piece.
It was sold, for over $1.8m, at the first Space Exploration sale Sotheby’s had held in 21 years. Two Russian Space History sales had been staged in 1993 and 1996 with material that constituted a new frontier for auction house catalogues. Lots included the spacesuit of Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to spacewalk; the Soyuz TM-10 space capsule, which flew in 1990; and lunar rocks collected by Luna 16, the first robotic probe to land on the moon – the only legal sale of moon rock to date.
Part of the reason for this year’s sale was the recruitment to Sotheby’s of Cassandra Hatton, a specialist in science, particularly space exploration.
‘This is an area that I have been dealing with for many years, so I was able to draw on my connections with dealers and collectors to source material,’ she says. Included in this were a number of paintings by Chesley Bonestell, an early 20th-century American painter whose work helped inspire the American space programme. Hatton came across them unexpectedly in a client’s home and asked if she could consign them. The highest selling fetched $125,000, over 12 times its upper estimate.
Although Hatton gathered lots from across the hemisphere of space artefacts, including a 1980s wind tunnel test model and a lunar globe signed by Alexei Leonov, Buzz Aldrin and seven other astronauts, the main focus of this sale was on pieces from America’s famed Apollo
programme – the first to land humans on the moon.
Initially conceived during President Eisenhower’s administration as the Cold War crept to its height, it was actually his successor John F Kennedy who announced the start of this ‘great new American enterprise’.
‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,’ he told the listening US Congress in 1961. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission succeeded.
In total, the Apollo programme landed 12 men on the moon and collected some 21.5kg of lunar rock and soil. It was wound down in 1973 having racked up a cost of some $25.4bn.
Those who grew up at the height of the space age now have the money to collect reminders… the pieces from the Apollo missions are markers of a golden era of space exploration
Alongside Armstrong’s sample bag, Sotheby’s also sold a beta cloth with the Apollo 11 emblem, used by Armstrong’s fellow pilot Michael Collins and signed by the Apollo 11 crew, which went over estimate at $68,750. Also up for sale was the flown flight plan from Apollo 13 – the subject of the eponymous 1995 film in which Tom Hanks utters the immortal line: ‘Houston, we have a problem’. It was the second-highest selling lot at $275,000.
According to Doug Millard, who oversaw the London Science Museum’s blockbuster ‘Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age’ exhibition in 2015, the recent interest in Apollo artefacts is a result of both time and bureaucracy.
‘Those who grew up at the height of the space age now have the money to collect reminders of their formative years,’ he says. ‘It helps too that the Obama administration passed legislation enabling NASA astronauts to keep those items they had surreptitiously held onto over the years and that items already on the market would not be chased by NASA for return.’
One such keepsake in the sale came from Fred Haise, the lunar module pilot on the unlucky Apollo 13 mission. Lot 141 was the Stars and Stripes flag he had taken with the intention of planting it on the moon. Due to an oxygen tank explosion, Apollo 13 never made it. The flag, signed by Haise, made $35,000.
For Haise, who remembers the ‘unreal’ views of Earth and it being so cold on board that they had to wear all their spare underwear, the pieces from the Apollo missions are markers of a golden era of space exploration. ‘We have not had an Apollo since and I don’t see it coming again soon,’ he said, speaking at Sotheby’s ahead of the auction. ‘At least not in my lifetime.’
What will be coming again is another Space Exploration sale. ‘I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun during a sale,’ Cassandra Hatton says. ‘I am already looking at possible dates for another in late spring 2018.’