One small pen for one giant fee: Buzz Aldrin’s mission-saving felt-tip sells for over $850,000

The felt-tip pen Buzz Aldrin used to fix a broken circuit-breaker and escape from the moon in 1969 has sold at auction in New York for more than $850,000 (£630,000).The dented silver plastic Duro Rocket pen – used by the second man on the moon to save Neil Armstrong and himself from being “stuck on the moon for ever” – had a sale price estimated by Sotheby’s at between $800,000 and $1.2m and went for $857,600 after being pursued by five bidders. The victor got the broken piece of circuit breaker, too, as part of the lot. Both came from Aldrin’s personal collection.Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the lunar surface on the historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 and were preparing to get some sleep after their first moon walk, when Aldrin noticed a small black switch on the floor of the cabin.As he writes in his 2009 autobiography Magnificent Desolation: “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.”The pen sold for $857,600. Photograph: Sotheby’sIn the letter of provenance provided by Sotheby’s, Aldrin jokes: “I think Neil broke the switch off and Neil thinks that I broke the switch off.”In his 2016 book No Dream Is Too High, however, Aldrin was more willing to take the blame for the incident. “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.”Either way, as Aldrin says in the Sotheby’s letter: “In the end, what mattered most was that we had to figure out how to solve the problem of the broken switch so that we could leave the lunar surface and get home to Earth.”The astronauts reported the issue to Mission Control, who hoped to reroute the power from that circuit. But by morning Houston had been unable to fix it, and informed Aldrin and Armstrong bluntly: “There is no way to reroute the power.”“I thought that if I could find something in the LM [lunar module] to push into the circuit, it might hold,” Aldrin writes in his autobiography. “But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end.”Buzz Aldrin, one of four men still alive who walked on the moon, believes Mars should be Nasa’s next mission. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty ImagesSuddenly, Aldrin thought of a black felt-tip pen he had brought as part of his “personal preference kit” – a set of personal items each astronaut was allowed to take onboard. “It wasn’t in the official list of items we took to the moon,” he says in No Dream Is Too High, “but I now had that pen in the shoulder pocket of my space suit.”He adds: “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, 96, is one of four men still alive who walked on the moon during the Apollo landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died in 2012.Nasa is now planning a return trip to the lunar surface as early as 2028, and in April sent four astronauts around the moon and back for the first time since 1972. China is also planning a crewed landing, with an apparent target of 2030.Aldrin has campaigned for Nasa to send astronauts to Mars and set up a base there. In 2013 he wrote in the New York Times: “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.”“I still have that broken circuit breaker from Apollo 11 and the felt-tip pen that helped get us off the moon,” Aldrin wrote in 2016. On Wednesday, that one small pen passed to a new owner – for one giant fee.