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Apollo 11 Flag Swatch Goes Unsold At L.A. Auction
According to an Associated Press report, a "strip of fabric shorn from the flag planted on the moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts pulled in a top bid of $60000 at a Los Angeles auction, but didn't meet a minimum price so it won't be sold." Another $35,000 would have nabbed it, but — caveat emptor — the strip of fabric under discussion is one that never went to the moon itself, but rather was snipped off before the rest of the flag was stuffed into a tube for the mission.
If it didn't go to the moon, who cares that it even went to auction?
for the rest of the flag the "did" go to the moon (wink, wink...) and was shown on TV.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
For Sale: Lady Gaga's Underwear
Condition: Slightly unused
Description: These underwear were owned by Gaga herself but never worn. It is not clear if she actually ever touched them or even knew she bought them. But they were hers for sure.
Bidding starts at $1000
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Give me a second....yeah, it's signed.
I can also rub it in some trash too. Hell, for $15K, I'll even fly down to Cape Canaveral and rub it in some trash from NASA.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"It was put in the trash can and I just took it out and said, `I'm going to keep that,'" he said.
Moser said he had Neil Armstrong sign a photo of the flag planted on the moon when the astronaut returned to Earth and he kept the picture and his rescued scrap of flag together in his NASA office until he retired in 1990.
"Buyer beware" is just good, if not cheesy advice. "Caveat emptor" refers to an actual set of laws as well as sounding cooler. You do realize that you complained about something sounding smart on a website that's "news for nerds". Maybe this is more your speed.
well that *is* a lot of money for a scrap of cloth.
Actually you get a little more than the scrap of cloth.
"Moser said he had Neil Armstrong sign a photo of the flag planted on the moon when the astronaut returned to Earth and he kept the picture and his rescued scrap of flag together in his NASA office until he retired in 1990. But after hanging onto the photo and flag-swatch assemblage all these years, he finally decided to put them up to auction.."
http://news.yahoo.com/swatch-moon-bound-flag-unsold-la-auction-032542272.html
If it didn't go to the moon, who cares that it even went to auction?
The summary conveniently fails to mention that it comes with an autograph of the first man to set foot on the moon, one of the men who actually raised the flag on the moon. The autograph is on a photo of the flag raising so the flag scrap seems to be something to enhance the signature.
that came off the same roll of fabric. This little bit is also just a bit of that roll that stayed behind. Sure, it has a sig, but it could just as well be another flag that was signed. Guess it is worth what a fool will pay for it.
!
Just like the 1000's of flags that came off the same roll of fabric. This little bit is also just a bit of that roll that stayed behind. Sure, it has a sig, but it could just as well be another flag that was signed. Guess it is worth what a fool will pay for it.
Actually this scrap comes from the guy who was in charge of creating the moon flag apparatus. So the scrap does have a pretty good paper trail as coming from the flag that made it to the moon.
"Mr. Moser, then a 30-year-old mechanical engineer, was put in charge of designing a flag mechanism that could not only fit into the lunar module and survive the flight, but also make the flag appear to fly on the windless moon. His solution involved two sections of a staff, a telescoping tube and a nylon flag bought at a local housing goods store (Sears, he thinks). But in order for the flag to fit the staff, its edges needed to be trimmed. “They were throwing it all in the trash,” Mr. Moser recalled of the remnants in a recent interview, “so I picked it up out of the trash can, mounted it and had Neil Armstrong sign it.” Forty-two years later, Mr. Moser is auctioning off those flag remnants."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/science/space/10moon.html
Another piece of cloth that was made from material that was grown on the same field as the one that produced the material for the flag! Bid starts at $10000
If I could afford it, hell, why not?
This is a piece of the flag that went up for the first moon landing. I don't care if it is the flag of another nation. I find it presumptuous to devalue the remnant because it never went to the moon. Heck, it's presumptuous to think that many people will ever own anything that actually went to the moon. It is even more absurd to assume that someone would buy it for its future selling price. The fact remains that it was part of humanities first foray to another planet. (And the Earth-Moon system is essentially a double planet system.) It is an important piece of history that says more about our future than almost any artifact dug out of the soil of our home planet.
To the nay-sayer's: just stuff it. You clearly have no appreciation of how important this achievement was. And it was unbelievably important since, within a few decades of achieving heavier than air flight, we managed to reach another world!
Yay for consistency in the media. NPR reports
Ah, NPR, the intellectual arm of American media that reports such gems as
to hold the banner out straight on the gravity-free moon.
If it was a chunk of the Berlin Wall, it'd be fucking worthless. The Berlin Wall was an extremely large thing and was broken into many pieces that are sold all over the world. Unless it's a very large piece of the wall (like, at least the size of a person) and it is covered with some of the known graffiti that was popular on the wall, then a chunk of the Berlin Wall is worth about as much as a chunk of any other rock laying around. The only market for pieces of the Berlin Wall today are in selling to sucker tourists, the same way those stupid "collector plates" you see sold on television have no value, but will get a quick first sale to some idiot decorating their house in Andy Griffith commemorative collector dinner plates.
You mean besides all those communion wafers?
The only true American flags are the ones that have not been altered from the pristine state they were in when they left the factory in China.