A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday, commanding top dollar not for their material value but for their role in saving the Apollo 11 mission.
Fifty-seven years ago, these humble items were aboard NASA's spacecraft during humanity's first Moon landing. The broken circuit breaker switch nearly stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, while the pen provided a simple fix that got them home.
"Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?" Aldrin radioed Mission Control after realizing the switch's tip had broken off. "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 scrambled for a solution, Aldrin devised one himself, as he later described in a letter that accompanied the artifacts.
"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. 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," he wrote.
"Now we could leave the lunar surface," Aldrin said, "rendezvous with Mike Collins in the command module, and head for home. Disaster averted."
Storied switch
The tale of the pen and circuit breaker is well-known, recounted by Aldrin in books and talks. For years, the story was included on the pamphlet packaged with every Fisher Space Pen sold, until Aldrin pointed out that as an engineer, he would never insert a metal-tipped writing instrument into a live electrical socket. The pen he used, sold on Wednesday, was a Duro-brand Rocket felt-tip marker.
