Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/20/astronaut-unknowingly-brought.html
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Flags are public emblems meant to be seen. To secretly hide a flag aboard a spaceship, and then claim the flag is more special for having been “flown” is pretty dumb. If no one knew it went to the moon until after it came back, doesn’t that degrade to whole provenance thing?
I’d rather have a moon rock.
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Sure. Dave Scott didn’t know that he took more souvenirs to the moon to be sold than he’d planned.
Sure. Sure. Totally believable.
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Value is such a weird concept sometimes.
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[quote]The flag is estimated to go for $15,000 and the bracket/pouch for $30,000[/quote]Suddenly I envision a cat burglar with a secret underground vault, containing a pilfered collection, assembled over the decades from every continent, of fabulously valuable … brackets.
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No argument there. Still, if I was given a 5/8 inch steel bolt that had been a part of the Apollo 11 moon landing module I probably wouldn’t just toss it into the jar of similar fasteners sitting in my garage.
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I just don’t get stuff like this. Like why people buy stuff that someone famous owned because, wow, it’s the actual pen he held. I do get if it’s an iconic piece of clothing from a movie - if in some way the object helped to create the moment - but just, oh, he signed this bill with this pen, to me it’s … I don’t have that thing that makes stuff like that interesting to me.
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If I had won the lottery this weekend - this would be a toy I’d buy.
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It’s a shame it had to be US flags, rather than something that wasn’t later irredeemably tainted by etc etc.
If it’d been, say, a small Troll doll I would really want that.
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The flag isn’t really any more or less tainted now than it was then. By 1971 the US flag had been associated with the Vietnam War and the internment of Japanese American citizens and the genocidal campaign against the American Indians and so on. But it also happens to be the flag of the only nation on earth that has even attempted to send humans to the moon, so there you have it.
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Lunar stage capitalism?
I guess that depends on how you look at it. The Soviets sent circumlunar probes and had programs for manned flybys and eventual moon landings, but the programs lost government support after Apollo 11.
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schrodinger’s pouch. If I took a pouch of unknown contents to the moon and never opened the pouch, did the contents actually go to the moon? Are there any contents? And how much would you pay for said contents?
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With quantum money?
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Bbbbut, these boxers have Bill Maher’s taint sweat on them!!!
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C.F. Gus Grissom’s Mercury Dimes
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What a coincidence. I, too, am selling flags that made it to the surface of the moon, unbeknownst to any crew or support personnel, and have been found and delivered to me by secret mechanisms. Get them while supplies last!
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On the bright side, it turned out pretty good for a sentence that starts out “Astronaut unknowingly brought …”
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Yeah, but I bet he dumped the spice.
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This flag was carried on the lunar surface throughout the geological explorationI think a geological exploration on the Moon must have gotten lost, given the meaning of "Geo".
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ha! This is another one of those ways that I feel like an outsider in nerd culture, because it seems like so many people love collecting stuff, and stuff is not really that exciting to me.
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