With the prospect of a lucrative business, astronauts secretly sent a hundred letters to the moon in the early '70s. A copy should now be auctioned. The starting bid of 22,000 euros was then but probably too high, no one struck.
The auction house Eppli, which wanted to auction off the Mondbriefe on Friday in Leinfelden-Echterdingen near Stuttgart, had called the starting price in advance as sporty. But it was a world rarity, said a spokeswoman: "It is a piece of history and one of the letters that is connected with the scandal over the mission."
The three astronauts of the Apollo 15 mission, Davis Scott, Alfred Worden and James Irwin, had taken the franked letters to the moon and back to Earth without permission from the US space agency Nasa - and for what it knows, pay.
The FBI came to Baden-Württemberg
According to reports of NASA, a German-American dealer had threaded the deal. He then sold the letters to a stamp company in Baden-Württemberg. The letters bear the signatures of the astronauts and stamps of the company that bought them 48 years ago. The stamps say "First Man on the Moon", even though the former Apollo 11 mission landed the first crew on the Earth satellite. How much the astronauts and the dealer earned with the business, is unknown until today, so the auction house.
The incident sparked a Nasa scandal and called into question the safety precautions for flights into space. The three astronauts were not allowed to participate after the announcement of the business on the next mission. Scott, Worden and Irwin should have had the transport approved; Selling the letters was forbidden to them anyway.
The FBI also investigated the case - and paid a visit to the stamp company that had bought the documents in Baden-Württemberg. The case could never be fully explained.