Astronaut Alan Bean knows how to turn stainless steel into gold. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. A group of 24 personally owned items from Bean’s collection sold for $625,375 in Heritage Auctions’ $1.1+ million Space Signature Auction on May 14, highlighted by several that went with him to the moon.
Fetching the highest bid was his pair of steel Apollo 12 Lunar Module Flown and Surface-Used Scissors with Lanyard, which sold for $100,000.
Other rarities from the golden age of space travel, including an Apollo 12 Lunar Module Flown and Surface-Used Waist Strap sold for $93,750.The Apollo 17 Flown Silver Robbins Medallion reached $59,375. An Apollo 12 Lunar Module Flown and Surface-Used Fisher AG-7 Space Pen sold for $53,125. Even a humble bit of wire was almost worth its weight in gold — an Apollo 12 Flown CM to LM Electrical Power “Umbilical” Cable, connected to supply power to the Lunar Module Intrepid from the Command Module “Yankee Clipper,” yielded $40,625.
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There’s only so much equipment that went to the Moon with Men, and even less of that which those men got to keep as personal possessions.
It’s a “finite resource”, as it were, as it doesn’t appear there will be any more of it in our lifetimes, much to the sorrow of all of us who believed — who were promised — that we were going to enter a Golden Age of human exploration of the solar system.
Much of the money stolen by financiers leading up to and in the 2007-2009-and-beyond financial disaster is capital which could have been used for that Golden Age.
We were also told that the increase in productivity would result in less work and more leisure for the middle class without a loss in income or income stability. Instead the profit from that increase in productivity was shifted to the same financial class.
The future we were promised literally has been stolen from us — and yes I know what the word “literally” means and I am using it properly.
So we’ve lost two separate aspects of the 21st century we expected to the same thieves.
I wish I believed in Hell, so that I could believe they could be burning in it for what they’ve taken from us.