Buzz Aldrin's felt-tip pen, which saved the Apollo 11 mission by fixing a broken circuit breaker on the moon, sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York for $857,600 (£630,000). The dented silver plastic Duro Rocket pen, from Aldrin's personal collection, was estimated to fetch between $800,000 and $1.2 million. Five bidders competed for the lot, which also included the broken circuit breaker piece.
The Critical Moment on the Lunar Surface
During the historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had just completed their first moon walk and were preparing to rest when Aldrin noticed a small black switch on the cabin floor. In his 2009 autobiography Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin wrote: "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."
In the letter of provenance provided by Sotheby's, Aldrin joked: "I think Neil broke the switch off and Neil thinks that I broke the switch off." However, in his 2016 book No Dream Is Too High, Aldrin took more responsibility: "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."
Finding a Solution
The astronauts reported the issue to Mission Control, who attempted to reroute power from that circuit. By morning, Houston had not found a fix and informed Aldrin and Armstrong: "There is no way to reroute the power." Aldrin then considered using something non-metallic to push into the circuit. He recalled a black felt-tip pen from his "personal preference kit"—a set of personal items each astronaut was allowed to take. "It wasn't in the official list of items we took to the moon," he said in No Dream Is Too High, "but I now had that pen in the shoulder pocket of my space suit."
The Pen That Saved the Mission
Aldrin described the moment: "I gingerly pressed the pen against the engine arm circuit breaker. For a long moment, I didn't want to remove the tip from the circuit breaker, hoping against hope that it would hold. Slowly, almost reluctantly, I eased the pressure on my hand and lifted the pen's tip. The pen did the trick; the circuit breaker held. We could return to Earth after all!"
Aldrin, now 96, is one of four surviving astronauts who walked on the moon during the Apollo landings. Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died in 2012. NASA is planning a return trip to the lunar surface as early as 2028, and in April 2023, four astronauts orbited the moon for the first time since 1972. China is also planning a crewed landing by 2030.
Aldrin's Vision for Mars
Aldrin has advocated for NASA to send astronauts to Mars and establish a base there. In a 2013 New York Times op-ed, he wrote: "A second 'race to the moon' is a dead end … In my view, US resources are better spent on moving toward establishing a human presence on Mars." Reflecting on the pen in 2016, Aldrin said: "I still have that broken circuit breaker from Apollo 11 and the felt-tip pen that helped get us off the moon." On Wednesday, that pen found a new owner for a astronomical sum.
