One small pen for one giant fee: Buzz Aldrin’s mission-saving felt-tip up for auction

Buzz Aldrin said the pen used to fix a broken circuit breaker helped him and Neil Armstrong to return. Photograph: Neil Armstrong/AP View image in fullscreen Buzz Aldrin said the pen used to fix a broken circuit breaker helped him and Neil Armstrong to return. Photograph: Neil Armstrong/AP One small pen for one giant fee: Buzz Aldrin’s mission-saving felt-tip up for auction Sotheby’s expects second man on moon’s marker, crucial to Apollo 11 return, to reach astronomical sum The felt-tip pen Buzz Aldrin used to fix a broken circuit breaker and escape from the moon in 1969 is up for auction in New York on Wednesday. The dented silver plastic Duro Rocket pen – used by the second man on the moon to save Neil Armstrong and himself from being “stuck on the moon for ever” – has a sale price estimated by Sotheby’s at between $800,000 and $1.2m. The lucky bidder will get the broken piece of circuit breaker, too. Both come from Aldrin’s personal collection. Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the lunar surface on the historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 and were preparing to get some sleep after their first moon walk, when Aldrin noticed a small black switch on the floor of the cabin. As he writes in his 2009 autobiography Magnificent Desolation: “My heart jolted a bit … The broken switch had snapped off from the engine-arm circuit breaker, the one vital breaker needed to send electrical power to the ascent engine that would lift Neil and me off the moon.” The pen is expected to reach between $800,000 and $1.2m. Photograph: Sotheby’s In the letter of provenance provided by Sotheby’s, Aldrin jokes: “I think Neil broke the switch off and Neil thinks that I broke the switch off.” In his 2016 book No Dream Is Too High, however, Aldrin was more willing to take the blame for the incident. “Because the breaker was located on my side of the capsule, I had apparently bumped it with the heavy backpack either preparing to step outside or when we had come back inside after walking on the moon.” Artemis II crew on their moon flyby: ‘Earth was this lifeboat hanging in the universe’ Read more Either way, as Aldrin says in the Sotheby’s letter: “In the end, what mattered most was that we had to figure out how to solve the problem of the broken switch so that we could leave the lunar surface and get home to Earth.” The astronauts reported the issue to Mission Control, who hoped to reroute the power from that circuit. But by morning Houston had been unable to fix it, and informed Aldrin and Armstrong bluntly: “There is no way to reroute the power.” “I thought that if I could find something in the LM [lunar module] to push into the circuit, it might hold,” Aldrin writes in his autobiography. “But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end.” View image in fullscreen Buzz Aldrin, one of four men still alive who walked on the moon, believes Mars should be Nasa’s next mission. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images