Space Souvenirs Generate Lofty Bids : Memorabilia: Items from U.S. and Russian missions are auctioned in Beverly Hills for $700,000. Treasures include helmets and some very old freeze-dried food.
The four plastic bowls of freeze-dried scrambled eggs, consomme, chicken and a beef patty never even made it into outer space.
And as for any culinary value, the sales catalogue declared: “After looking at this food, you’ll never complain about your spouse’s cooking again.”
Yet the uneaten meals, leftovers of the Space Shuttle program’s training missions, still fetched a four-star, a la carte price of $80 Sunday at an auction of U.S. and Russian space memorabilia in Beverly Hills.
Some bidders’ fascination with space travel, it seems, goes beyond good taste.
“Most people know they’ll never get to the moon, they’ll never get to space. So they want these materials as their own part of history,” explained Michael Orenstein, the space auction’s director at the Superior Stamp and Coin company.
To the pleasure of bidders, many of the 1,374 items in the semiannual sale had more direct connections to history than those freeze-dried delicacies did. And to the pleasure of the company, most objects attracted higher prices, bringing in about $700,000 in gross sales from the two-day auction.
For example, someone bidding by telephone from Italy paid $10,500 for a flight suit that Neil Armstrong wore during high-altitude tests several years before he was the first human to walk on the moon, in July, 1969.
Someone else paid $4,500 for a left-handed glove worn in space by a Soviet cosmonaut during the October, 1977, flight of Soyuz 25. An autographed photo of astronaut Michael J. Smith, killed with the rest of his crew in the 1986 Challenger explosion, went for $250. And a postcard written by Yuri A. Gagarin, the first man to travel in space, sold for $2,700.
Collectors came from as far away as Germany. One of the most energetic bidders was Tasillo Roemisch, who owns a private aviation and space museum in the eastern German city of Mittweida.
Among the treasures he captured Sunday were high-pressure “long johns” used in U.S.high-altitude training ($750), an uneaten set of chocolate chip and survival bars flown in a space shuttle ($170) and a tiny foil packet of tomato seeds that spent six years in space, orbiting aboard the U.S. space laboratory ($75.)
“I have a lot of Russian stuff and now I want a lot of American,” Roemisch said, adding that eastern Germans, long taught about the Soviet space program, are now more interested in U.S. achievements.
At the same time, Americans showed interest in the Russian items.
A U.S. telephone bidder who wished to remain anonymous paid $12,000 for the sale catalogue’s cover item: a 1992 oil painting by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. Showing a range of brilliant blues, the artwork depicts the 1975 docking of the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft with the American Apollo ship.
Thomas Asher, a flight instructor and helmet collector from Dallas, left Beverly Hills a happy man. He paid $380 for a 1950s-era MA-2 high-altitude helmet, complete with earphones and microphone, and $130 for a 1955 Navy F-4 helmet worn by Richard Gordon, who later flew on the Apollo 12 mission to the moon.
Why helmets? “There’s nothing else you can have in your home,” explained Asher, who came to California just for the sale. “Aircraft parts are too bulky. You can’t have a propeller or a wing in your living room.”
The space goods were mainly on consignment from other collectors and from astronauts and their families.
A few items had a controversial pedigree: Astronauts were not supposed to sell mementos that they had taken into space, and other space program employees were not supposed to take home souvenirs that really belonged to taxpayers.
NASA representatives have said it is very unlikely that anyone would be prosecuted for contraband tomato seeds flown 20 years ago.
And Orenstein, of Superior Stamp and Coin, insisted that nothing wrong was done.
“At one point in time, people took things that NASA was throwing away. So it was not stealing it because nobody else wanted it or because it could have been in the dustbin,” he stated.
That probably included that freeze-dried food that Gregg Linebaugh, an aerospace research analyst from Maryland, bought for $80, sight unseen. He has no intention of opening the four containers or tasting the contents, which he expects will be “pretty raunchy.”
He may keep two for his collection of space memorabilia and resell the others. “I think,” he remarked, “it’s a good investment.”
