moon Dust, a fragment of shell of a capsule or even a map of the stars… objects from lunar missions, radiating in the sales rooms. A souvenir plaque of the Apollo 11 mission, from the personal collection of astronaut Neil Armstrong taken on the Moon in 1969, has been awarded 468.500 dollars at the sale organized by Heritage Auctions in Dallas (Texas). It represents the lunar module that landed on 20 July 1969, on the surface of the natural satellite of the Earth.
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back on Earth, it was mounted on a wood support, before being offered to Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon. The other two astronauts who participated in the Apollo 11 mission, Edwin «Buzz» Aldrin and Michael Collins, have also each received one of these plates.
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The two sons of Neil Armstrong, Rick and Mark, had decided to disperse the collection of their father, who died in August 2012, which represents more than two-thousand objects. Only a part of the collection was proposed during the sale organised on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Dallas but also online.
A sale which brought in $ 5.2 million
Two other sales are planned in may and November 2019 by the auction house Heritage Auctions, which organized the first. The commemorative plaque was better than the batch that was to be expected as the highlight of the sale, an american flag taken during the trip to the Moon, but never deployed on-site.
bigger than most of the banners taken in the space (45 cm 29), it was sold for 275.000 dollars, including commissions and fees. This is more than triple the estimate of the auction house, which had assessed $ 75,000.
Very expected also two lots of fragments of the plane of the Wright brothers, whose first flight in December 1903, is considered the birth of modern aviation. These fragments have also been carried by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission and are thus a double historical importance. They have each been sold 275.000$, that is, for one of the two, nine times the initial estimate.
In total, the first part of the dispersal of the collection, Armstrong has reported $ 5.2 million, said Sunday, Heritage Auctions in a press release.
