In case you haven’t heard AND you have a bunch of spare cash lying around AND you don’t wish to send said cash to me, the Space Auction is set for January 13th. These are items that include everything from stuff that went into space to autographed pictures of astronauts. Come on, you know you want space stuff.
What can you bid on? Here’s the rundown of some of the featured items:
There’s a set of head shots of the Original Mercury Seven astronauts, all autographed. You get slightly faded but clearly autographed pictures of John Glenn (with a bitchin’ bowtie!), Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, and Gordon Cooper. Bidding starts at $500.
From Gemini 3, there’s a dime Gus Grissom carried with him on the mission. That’ll start at a thousand bucks, which is a lot for a dime, no matter where it’s been. There’s an 8×10 with little headshots of all the Groups One, Two, and Three astronauts, autographed by 19 of them, seven of whom walked on the moon.
And there’s more. Much more.
There’s a lot from the Apollo missions. How about an electrical power instrument panel from one of the Apollo command modules? The thing’s about 20 pounds, has a bunch of dials and switches and stuff, and may have been used in training. You can also bid on a flight-flown medal from Apollo 7, a flight plan page (autographed by Buzz Aldrin) from Apollo 11, the headset worn by Charlie Duke in Mission Control while talking to Neil Armstrong during Apollo 11’s trip to the moon, an Apollo 16 Heat Flow Experiment safety flag and pin with a little lunar dust on it, and…
Well, there’s always one piece that towers over all others. In this auction, that would be the November 1969 page from the Playboy calendar.
Wait, what?
Yep, you can bid — it starts at $1,000 — on a topless color photo of Miss August 1967, DeDe Lind, stashed aboard Apollo 12, attached to a cardboard cue card as a prank. It’s one of two Playboy bunny pictures to make it to the moon and back, the description notes, leaving a few questions, like whether there were any to make it to the moon but not back.
Anyway, you, too, can own a piece of, um, history. There are a lot of things that might be closer to your budget, too, from Neil Armstrong’s autographed business card to a commemorative cover postmarked at Moffet Field, CA and signed by none other than Richard M. Nixon himself. You want a mechanical pencil used on Gemini X? Fragments of Skylab that landed in Australia? Personal checks, uncanceled, written and signed by the Challenger crew days before their ill-fated mission? All available.
Go bid here.
HT: Gizmodo, TG Daily, SlashGear
Images: RR Auctions
We moved to Houston TX during the Skylab years, during the early Seventies, and moved into a house in a suburb called Clear Lake Forest. Many of the astronaut families lived in our neighborhood and my sister had classes with one of the Shepard kids. We used to stand in the street at night and track Skylab as it crossed the sky. Of course this was all before we all realized that the entire space program was a sham filmed at Area 51. At least that’s what my wife insists.
My wife went to John Glenn High School.
Also: Arooo!