During a media preview on July 13, Cassandra Hatton of Sotheby's displays the Apollo 11 contingency lunar sample return bag. It was used by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 to bring back the first pieces of the moon ever collected. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Imageshide caption
Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET
A small, humble-looking bag received its moment in the spotlight today. It traveled to the moon and back, then sat forgotten in a museum basement. It was seized by officials who didn't know its value, sold unceremoniously to a keen-eyed space enthusiast, then battled over in court.
Then the lunar collection bag from the Apollo 11 mission — and the tiny bits of moon dust embedded within it — hit the Sotheby's auction block.
Nancy Carlson purchased the bag for less than $1,000. On Thursday, it sold for $1.5 million (lower than the $2 million plus that Sotheby's had predicted).
The cloth bag, about the size of a sheet of notebook paper, was used by Neil Armstrong as he gathered samples during the first manned mission to the moon in 1969 — exactly 48 years ago on Thursday.
Most of the artifacts from that historic mission are in the collections of the Smithsonian. Somehow this bag was separated from the other equipment, and its significance went unrecognized.
It wound up in the garage of a man named Max Ary, who was the former director of a space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas. The Kansas City Star reports that under Ary's leadership, that museum, the Cosmosphere, had "a wealth of space travel artifacts" — and no shortage of chaos:
"Record keeping, say both Ary and the museum's current administration, was at best inexact. The rush of the items brought to the Cosmosphere became jumbled in sometimes slap-dash, handwritten inventory lists.
"At some point in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Smithsonian sent loosely organized boxes of materials to Kansas that probably included the lunar sample bag.
" 'People knew that this was Apollo hardware, this was Gemini hardware,' said Jim Remar, the Cosmosphere's current president and CEO who joined the museum in 2000. 'But nobody knew if this was flown on a respective mission or not.' "
"Remar said the now-prized lunar collection bag almost certainly ended up in the museum basement."
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