Buzz Aldrin sells famous felt-tip pen that helped launch Apollo from the Moon

A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday. What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to 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. More than flown odds and ends, one was the problem that almost stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, and the other was the simple solution to saving the mission. “Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?” radioed Aldrin to Mission Control after realizing he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, beginning their trip back to Earth. “The reason I’m asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off. I think we can push it back in again. I’m not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though.” As engineers on the ground worked to devise a workaround, Aldrin came up with a straightforward idea, as he described decades later in the letter accompanying the artifacts’ sale. Aldrin also loaned the pen and broken-off circuit breaker switch to the Smithsonian for its “Destination Moon” traveling exhibit featuring the Apollo 11 command module “Columbia.” The tour visited five US cities over the course of two years, spanning the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing in 2019.