Buzz Aldrin Gives Up Pen That Prevented Lunar Disaster

Buzz Aldrin has handed off a humble plastic pen that helped him and Neil Armstrong avoid being stranded on the moon. Sotheby's on Wednesday auctioned the dented silver felt-tip Aldrin used to jury-rig a broken circuit breaker on Apollo 11, with the pen and the snapped-off switch from Aldrin's personal collection fetching just over $857,000. Aldrin previously wrote about how his heavy backpack must've bumped the breaker that powered the engine needed to leave the lunar surface as he was coming or going from his 1969 moonwalk, resulting in the switch breaking off, the Guardian reports.

With Mission Control unable to reroute power from the circuit, Aldrin eventually used the nonmetal tip of the pen, one of a few personal items he'd brought along, to push the breaker back into place. "Since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end," he later wrote. "The pen did the trick; the circuit breaker held. We could return to Earth after all!" Other items up for grabs in Sotheby's Space Exploration auction included Aldrin's Apollo 11 flight jacket and an American flag flown during the first US spacewalk in 1965, per Popular Science. The jacket sold for just over $20,000 and the flag for $35,840.