Buzz Aldrin's felt-tip pen, which he used to fix a broken circuit breaker on the Apollo 11 mission, sold at auction in New York for $857,600 (£630,000). The dented silver plastic Duro Rocket pen, crucial to the astronauts' return from the moon, was estimated by Sotheby's at between $800,000 and $1.2 million. Five bidders pursued the lot, which also included the broken piece of circuit breaker. Both items came from Aldrin's personal collection.
The Broken Switch That Nearly Stranded Astronauts
Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the lunar surface in July 1969. After their first moon walk, while preparing to sleep, Aldrin noticed a small black switch on the cabin floor. In his 2009 autobiography Magnificent Desolation, he 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 a 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, he took more responsibility, suggesting he may have bumped the breaker with his backpack.
Mission Control Could Not Reroute Power
The astronauts reported the issue to Mission Control, who hoped to reroute power from that circuit. By morning, Houston informed them bluntly: "There is no way to reroute the power." Aldrin wrote: "I thought that if I could find something in the LM [lunar module] to push into the circuit, it might hold. But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end."
Aldrin then remembered a black felt-tip pen he had brought as part of his "personal preference kit." He said: "It wasn't in the official list of items we took to the moon, but I now had that pen in the shoulder pocket of my space suit." He pressed the pen against the circuit breaker, and it held. "We could return to Earth after all!" he wrote.
Aldrin's Advocacy and Future Moon Missions
Aldrin, now 96, is one of four surviving moonwalkers. Neil Armstrong died in 2012. NASA plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2028, while China aims for a crewed landing by 2030. Aldrin has long advocated for a mission to Mars, writing in a 2013 New York Times op-ed: "A second 'race to the moon' is a dead end … US resources are better spent on moving toward establishing a human presence on Mars."
In 2016, Aldrin wrote: "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 passed to a new owner for what Sotheby's described as an astronomical sum.
