Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is selling off some incredible artifacts from his personal collection, including the cool jacket above that he wore during the 1969 moon landing mission. (The moon landing took place 53 years ago today!) Sotheby's, who are running the Buzz Aldrin: American Icon auction, estimates that the jacket will go for $1-$2 million. Fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong's and Michael Collins's jackets are both in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. I hope many of the items from this auction end up in a museum as well. From CNN:
Also on sale is the Eagle lunar module's circuit breaker switch, which infamously broke during the mission, threatening to leave Armstrong and Aldrin stranded on the moon's surface. It is being sold alongside the felt-tip pen that the latter improvised with to ignite the engine and return to the orbiting Columbia command module[…]
Another notable lot from the Apollo 11 mission is a systems activation checklist, containing diagrams and flight data, which Aldrin was supposed to discard on the moon's surface. Sotheby's estimated that the manuscript will sell for between $150,000 and $250,000.
