Buzz Aldrin Is Selling His Apollo 11 Jacket & Other Personal Belongings

It has been 53 years since man last stepped foot on the moon and set humanity off on a new course for the future. To celebrate the anniversary, the jacket Buzz Aldrin wore on the expedition is heading to auction.  

Sotheby’s is running the Buzz Aldrin: American Icon collection, where the astronaut himself will be releasing items from his personal collection to be sold on the auction block.

The auction house estimates that the outerwear could be sold for as high as US$2 million. Aldrin’s lunar jacket is constructed from a material called Beta Cloth that, at the time, was the newest form of flammable material there was.

The white buttoned jacket also has Aldrin’s nametag—which reads “E. Aldrin”—and the NASA and Apollo 11 crests stitched onto it. 

Joining this piece at the sale is a memorandum that was meant to be left on the moon, along with a felt tip pen that Aldrin used in an emergency to get the engine of the orbiting Command Module Columbia running.

Another item is the circuit breaker from the Lunar Module Eagle that broke during the mission, threatening to leave the astronauts stranded on the moon. Fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, on the other hand, have donated their jackets to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.   

10 lots from the collection will be occupied with a MIRAimage non-fungible token that connects to a microscopic 3D and mathematical technique which identifies and authenticates the objects. MIRA will create the NFT and store it in the Ethereum blockchain in perpetuity. 

[via Boing Boing and Fortune, images via various sources]