As reported on Bloomberg News, yesterday at Bonhams, prices remained steady for goods with an outer space provenance.

Armstrong’s Apollo 11 Star Chart Sells for $218,000 in New York

By Lindsay Pollock

July 17 (Bloomberg) — A plastic disc-shaped star chart used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their 1969 Apollo 11 moonwalk fetched $218,000 at a Bonhams auction in New York.

The navigational chart, estimated to fetch up to $90,000 at yesterday’s sale, was bought by Stephan Loewentheil, a Maryland- based rare-book dealer who collects Apollo artifacts.

“It’s been to the moon and made it back with the boys,” said Loewentheil, wearing a busy beard.

The star chart was priciest item in a 385-lot auction that Bonhams had forecast to tally between $1.6 million and $2.3 million. The sale took $1.7 million, with 287 lots, or 75 percent, finding buyers. The auction was Bonhams’s first dedicated to space exploration and timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission.

“It’s clear there are collectors at all price ranges,” said Bonhams’s Matthew Haley, who was in charge of the sale. “The things that have mass appeal are the ones that do best.”

A pair of macho astronaut-worn standard issue military gold-rimmed sunglasses and fire-proof case flown on Apollo 13 cruised by a $4,000 high estimate, selling for $18,300 to an unidentified phone bidder. Why the giant price? “The sunglasses were just really cool,” said Haley.

Flight-Control Equipment

Other pricey items included a 1971 piece of flight-control equipment used during Apollo 15 — resembling a hand-made, high- school science project, which fetched $206,000, against the $200,000 low estimate. An astronaut cuff checklist, worn on the wrist for a 1972 Apollo 16 mission, sold for $206,000, funds that will be donated to the non-profit Infinity Science Center.

The sale clipped along in Bonhams’s underground salesroom at its New York Madison Avenue headquarters, hung with spacecraft drawings and blue prints, resembling a retired astronaut’s recreation room.

The crowd weren’t the classic art collector-types. What appeared to be die-hard space junkies of the older set turned up, wearing NASA pins and golf shirts emblazed with NASA logos.

One couple, Myron and Judith Kaller, took careful notes on prices. They own 1,800 space items, said Myron Kaller, many on loan to institutions. “We are hooked onto the outer space,” said Kaller, wearing a tie with images of planets and moon- strutting astronauts.

Handwritten Checklist

Gene Westerberg, a retired physicist from San Francisco was a disappointed bidder. He competed in vain for a sheet of hand- annotated notes used during Apollo 13, an ill-fated mission remembered for an oxygen-tank explosion.

The notes were a checklist for coping with emergency conditions, and crucial to the survival of the astronauts. The sheet was estimated to sell for up to $4,500, and instead fetched $27,450 from an anonymous phone bidder.

Not everything went into orbit. Three sheets from an Apollo 11 landing sequence checklist, estimated up to make over $125,000, failed to sell. Another big-ticket item also estimated to sell for upward of $125,000, was an Apollo 14 dust-brush used to remove lunar particles from camera lenses.

It bit the dust without landing a single bid.

Prices include a buyer’s premium, or commission, of 22 percent of the hammer price of the first $100,000, 20 percent of the price above $100,000 to $500,000, and 12 percent above $500,000. Estimates do not reflect commissions.

To contact the reporter on the story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com;