Monday, February 09, 2015 7:45:42 PM
The Armstrong Purse: Flown Apollo 11 Lunar Artifacts
Posted on February 6, 2015 by The National Air and Space Museum
At the National Air and Space Museum, as elsewhere around the world, we were enormously saddened when we learned that Neil Alden Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, had died of complications associated with heart surgery in August 2012. Not long afterwards his family contacted the Museum about artifacts he left in his home office in Ohio. In November, Museum curators Margaret Weitekamp (social and cultural history of space exploration), Alex Spencer (personal aeronautical equipment), and I (as Apollo curator) traveled to Cincinnati and were warmly greeted by his widow, Carol. We reviewed the items with the intention of listing those we felt appropriate for possible donation to the National Collection.
The Armstrong family had already decided to donate Neil’s correspondence and paper files to his alma mater, Purdue University. The remaining collection of personal items and memorabilia was also extremely rich. Margaret and Alex may have the opportunity to write about these items in the near future.
This post is about something else however. A few weeks after we returned to Washington, D.C., I received an email from Carol Armstrong that she had located in one of Neil’s closets a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft. She wanted to know if they were also of interest to the Museum. She provided the following photograph of the bag and the items spread out on her carpet.
Photograph provided by Carol Armstrong showing the objects found within the white cloth bag.
Apollo 11 16mm Data Acquisition Camera. Below are a handful of images captured by this camera.
[...]
In the future, we hope to complete documenting and cataloging the entire collection of items and, as appropriate, to place them on public display. Seeing such things with one’s own eyes helps us to appreciate that these accomplishments are not just in history books or movies, but involved real people and real things, and that they involved an extraordinary amount of detailed engineering and planning.
Allan Needell is a curator in the Space History Department.
http://blog.nasm.si.edu/highlights-from-the-collection/the-armstrong-purse/
Need more detail?
Visit the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website for extensive information on this collection of objects.
Lunar Surface Flown Apollo 11 Artifacts
From the Neil Armstrong Estate
on loan to the
Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11ReturnedEagleArtifacts.html
Posted on February 6, 2015 by The National Air and Space Museum
At the National Air and Space Museum, as elsewhere around the world, we were enormously saddened when we learned that Neil Alden Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, had died of complications associated with heart surgery in August 2012. Not long afterwards his family contacted the Museum about artifacts he left in his home office in Ohio. In November, Museum curators Margaret Weitekamp (social and cultural history of space exploration), Alex Spencer (personal aeronautical equipment), and I (as Apollo curator) traveled to Cincinnati and were warmly greeted by his widow, Carol. We reviewed the items with the intention of listing those we felt appropriate for possible donation to the National Collection.
The Armstrong family had already decided to donate Neil’s correspondence and paper files to his alma mater, Purdue University. The remaining collection of personal items and memorabilia was also extremely rich. Margaret and Alex may have the opportunity to write about these items in the near future.
This post is about something else however. A few weeks after we returned to Washington, D.C., I received an email from Carol Armstrong that she had located in one of Neil’s closets a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft. She wanted to know if they were also of interest to the Museum. She provided the following photograph of the bag and the items spread out on her carpet.
Photograph provided by Carol Armstrong showing the objects found within the white cloth bag.
Apollo 11 16mm Data Acquisition Camera. Below are a handful of images captured by this camera.
[...]
In the future, we hope to complete documenting and cataloging the entire collection of items and, as appropriate, to place them on public display. Seeing such things with one’s own eyes helps us to appreciate that these accomplishments are not just in history books or movies, but involved real people and real things, and that they involved an extraordinary amount of detailed engineering and planning.
Allan Needell is a curator in the Space History Department.
http://blog.nasm.si.edu/highlights-from-the-collection/the-armstrong-purse/
Need more detail?
Visit the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website for extensive information on this collection of objects.
Lunar Surface Flown Apollo 11 Artifacts
From the Neil Armstrong Estate
on loan to the
Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11ReturnedEagleArtifacts.html
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