Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's moon landing was saved by a single pen

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 mission almost ended in disaster if not for a common piece of equipment.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their famous steps 55 years ago but Armstrong’s famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind,” are inked in history forever. NASA’s Apollo 11 mission almost became a catastrophe in 1969 had it not been for Aldrin’s quick thinking and innovation – and a felt-tip pen.

The pen that saved Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

On July 20, 1969, Aldrin and Armstrong arrived on the moon and took their first steps the next day at 2:56am GMT. The two astronauts collected data and soil samples for three hours before returning to the Lunar Module (LM).

As they climbed back into the module, however, Aldrin accidentally hit the engine-arm circuit breaker switch with the life support backpack on his suit.

“I looked closer and jolted a bit,” Aldrin recalled in his book, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon. “There on the dust on the floor on the right side of the cabin, lay a circuit breaker switch that had broken off.”

The switch was the most vital switch on the panel as it powered the module’s ascent engine to lift the spacecraft and dock up with Michael Collins in the Command Module Columbia.

The incident was reported to the Mission Control Center in Houston but a solution was not found, and most of their onboard tools were reportedly already disposed of to decrease the module weight.

Thankfully, Aldrin ingeniously used a felt-tip pen by Duro Marker to fix the broken switch.

“After examining it more closely, I thought that if I could find something in the LM to push into the circuit, it might hold,” Aldrin writes. “But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end. I had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of my suit that might do the job.”

The pen held the circuit breaker and the three astronauts were able to splash down into the Pacific Ocean, 920 miles southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii.

The scenario was serious enough for NASA to install guards over circuit breaks on subsequent lunar modules.

Apollo 11 felt-tip pen estimated worth is seven figures

Astronomy fans with a couple of million dollars to spare can splash out on the famous moon landing pen if it goes on auction once again. On the mission’s 53rd anniversary (July 26, 2022), Aldrin’s Rocket pen was put on auction by Sotheby’s, with an estimated worth of $1-2 million.

But the prized pen became the only artifact in the Apollo 11 collection that failed to sell. The starting bid opened at $500,000 but the bidding only reached $650,000. The lot was unsold because it failed to reach the pre-set limit.

Aldrin’s jacket made history as the most expensive flown-in space artifact, sold for $2,772,500.

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