Buzz Aldrin’s mission-saving felt-tip pen sells for $857,600 at auction
A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic, together responsible for saving the Apollo 11 mission from potential disaster, sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday.
What might otherwise have been worthless bits of trash commanded top dollar because of where the two items were 57 years ago: lifting off aboard NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft on humanity’s first mission to land astronauts on the Moon.
The story begins with a moment of alarm. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin completed their historic Moonwalk on July 20, 1969, Aldrin realized that he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, the critical step that would begin their trip back to Earth.
“Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?” Aldrin radioed to Mission Control. “The reason I’m asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off.”
As engineers on the ground worked to devise a workaround, Aldrin came up with a simple solution. He had a plastic felt-tip pen in one of his suit pockets.
“While I could have stuck my finger in and reset the switch, there was electricity flowing through the breaker and I did not want to electrocute myself,” Aldrin later wrote in a letter accompanying the artifacts’ sale. “I had a plastic felt tip pen in one of my suit pockets and it fit into the breaker opening, so I pushed the marker pen into the circuit breaker, it clicked on, and we rearmed the Engine Arm circuit.”
The pen he used was a Duro-brand Rocket felt-tip marker. Aldrin had long corrected the popular misconception that he used a metal-tipped Fisher Space Pen, pointing out that as an engineer, he would never insert a metal writing instrument into a live electrical socket.
“Now we could leave the lunar surface,” Aldrin said, “rendezvous with Mike Collins in the command module, and head for home. Disaster averted.”
The artifacts were previously loaned to the Smithsonian for its “Destination Moon” traveling exhibit alongside the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, which toured five US cities over two years spanning the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing.
A 2012 law reaffirmed that Aldrin and his fellow Apollo-era astronauts legally owned spacecraft hardware and crew equipment they kept as mementos from their missions. This was at least the second time the pen and switch had been offered for sale. In 2022, Sotheby’s listed the same set in Aldrin’s “American Icon” sale, with bids reaching $650,000, but the lot failed to meet its reserve. This time, the bids reached $670,000, and it was sold on behalf of the Buzz Aldrin Family Trust. The final price of $857,600 includes the buyer’s premium.
The winning bidder was not identified. While an impressive sum, the sale did not break into the top 10 list of highest prices for space artifacts, which begins at $1.625 million, the amount paid in 2015 for a Bulova watch worn on the Moon.
Still, few artifacts carry a story as direct as this one: a humble felt-tip pen that saved the most famous mission in human history from ending in tragedy.