Ars Technica23%
Buzz Aldrin sells famous felt-tip pen that helped launch Apollo from the Moon 10%
By Robert Pearlman5%
7/15/2026, 10:10:41 PM
Topics: Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin
BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Anchoring Bias, Hindsight Bias, and Halo Effect, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 10.2% saturation with 80 hits. Analysis detected 555 faulty-reasoning hits from 785 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 26.5% and a BS Rank of 10% (19,212 of 21,169 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 90.80% of the article peer group.
A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday.
What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to where the two items were 57 years ago—lifting off aboard NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft on humanity’s first mission to land astronauts on the Moon.
More than flown odds and ends, one was the problem that almost stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, and the other was the simple solution to saving the mission.
“Houston, Tranquility.
Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?”
radioed Aldrin to Mission Control after realizing he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, beginning their trip back to Earth.
“The reason I’m asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off.
I think we can push it back in again.
I’m not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though.”
As engineers on the ground worked to devise a workaround, Aldrin came up with a straightforward idea, as he described decades later in the letter accompanying the artifacts’ sale.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s letter describing the broken circuit breaker switch and felt-tip pin from his Moon mission.
“While I could have stuck my finger in and reset the switch, there was electricity flowing through the breaker and I did not want to electrocute myself.
I had a plastic felt tip pen in one of my suit pockets and it fit into the breaker opening, so I pushed the marker pen into the circuit breaker, it clicked on, and we rearmed the Engine Arm circuit,” he wrote.
“Now we could leave the lunar surface,” Aldrin said, “rendezvous with Mike Collins in the command module, and head for home.
Disaster averted.”
Aldrin also loaned the pen and broken-off circuit breaker switch to the Smithsonian for its “Destination Moon” traveling exhibit featuring the Apollo 11 command module “Columbia.”
The tour visited five US cities over the course of two years, spanning the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing in 2019.
The location of the engine arm circuit breaker switch in the Apollo lunar module that was broken off on Apollo 11.
A law enacted in 2012 reaffirmed that Aldrin and his fellow Apollo-era astronauts legally had title to the spacecraft hardware and other crew equipment they kept as mementos from their missions.
The pieces are theirs to own, sell, trade, or donate as they desire.
This was at least the second time that the pen and switch had been offered for sale.
In 2022, Sotheby’s listed the same set as part of its “Buzz Aldrin: American Icon” sale.
Despite eliciting bids up to $650,000, the lot failed to reach its reserve and was passed.
This time, the bids reached $670,000, and it was sold on behalf of the Buzz Aldrin Family Trust.
The $857,600 total includes the buyer’s premium assessed by Sotheby’s.
The winning bidder was not identified other than as a participant by phone.
While the sale price was impressive, the pen and switch did not break into the top 10 list of the highest prices at a public sale for space artifacts and memorabilia.
That ranking begins at $1.625 million, the amount paid in 2015 for a Bulova watch worn outside on the surface of the Moon during the 1971 Apollo 15 mission and tops out at the $2,882,500 spent for the former Soviet Union’s Vostok 3KA-2 space capsule as auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2011.
The broken circuit breaker switch that nearly ended Apollo 11, and the pen that Buzz Aldrin used to save himself and Neil Armstrong.
As a point of comparison, the second-highest price for a space-flown artifact was the $2,772,500 commanded by Aldrin’s Apollo 11 in-flight jacket, which Sotheby’s sold in 2022.
Wednesday’s “Space Exploration” sale was part of Sotheby’s annual Geek Week of science and technology-themed auctions.
The sale offered 134 lots, including more than 40 items from Aldrin’s collection.
In total, it brought in $2,862,336.
A modern Moonshine gold Omega Speedmaster chronograph, one of 24 watches consigned by the Aldrin Family Trust, sold for $70,400.
The same 2026 model is still for sale from Omega for $53,500 retail.
Another sale highlight, and the only item other than the pen and switch set to sell for six figures, was the pressure hatch from the Skylab III command module, flown to and from the United States’ first space station in 1974.
It sold for $192,000.
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66%flagged-word coverageBuzz Aldrin
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