The 50th anniversary of mans first landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 falls this month. Christie’s is marking the occasion with One Giant Leap, an auction celebrating space exploration 50 years after Apollo 11. The highlight of the sale, which takes place in New York on July 18, is the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Timeline Book used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to navigate the lunar module Eagle onto the surface of the moon. It includes traces of moon dust and almost 150 handwritten annotations including Lunar Module Eagle’s coordinates on the lunar surface within moments of landing, marking the first writing by a human being on an extraterrestrial body. This writing is illustrated in the image here. The book is estimated at $7-9 million. The sale will include nearly 200 artefacts from NASA missions of the Sixties and Seventies including the Gemini and Apollo programmes.
A bag once nearly thrown out with the rubbish sold for $1.8 million at Sotheby’s in New York. It was the one Neil Armstrong used to collect the first ever samples of the moon.