Apollo 13 Mission Manual Pages To Be Auctioned

astroengine writes "On April 13 — the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 accident — Bonhams in New York City will auction off pages from the Apollo 13 mission manual, with handwritten notes by flight commander Jim Lovell. I'm thinking the chances of actually outbidding a rich space enthusiast are slim to none, but having a chance at owning a piece of spaceflight history should be popular nonetheless." Here is an item listing page at Bonhams for one of those pages, which, as Gizmodo notes, saved three astronauts' lives.

Comments

Who is selling and why?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Whoever it is selling this deserves a lot of pity. Whether it be NASA who needs the money or an old NASA employee (maybe astronaut?) who needs the money or an old collector who needs the money or the estate of an old collector or NASA employee that needs to liquidate it, there really must be a sad story behind the selling of an item that belongs in a museum.

You can see it right now

[Comboman]

In effect, no one will ever see it again. Why can't NASA give it to a museum?

If you want to see it, go to the item listing page at Bonhams. You can see a high-resolution photo of both sides of the sheet. For the purposes of research or curiosity that's a much closer look than you would get if it were behind glass in a museum. Besides, even though the Air & Space museum is huge (they've got a Concorde, 727, SR-71, Space Shuttle, etc), they don't have room to preserve and display every piece of paper that an astronaut ever wrote on. This is ONE PAGE out a binder with hundreds of pages, which is one of thousands of binders NASA used in the space program. It's autographed on one side by Lovell, so I suspect this is from his personal binder and a some point he was using pages out of it for autographs instead of using photos. Just because something is collectible, doesn't mean it's historically significant.