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A souvenir plaque of the Apollo 11 mission, taken to the moon in 1969, was sold for $ 468,500 at the sale, in Dallas, Texas, of the personal collection of astronaut Neil Armstrong.
The plate represents the lunar module that landed, on July 20, 1969, on the surface of the natural satellite of the Earth.
Back on Earth, she was mounted on a wooden stand before being offered to Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon.
The other two astronauts who participated in the Apollo 11 mission, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins, also each received one of these plates.
Neil Armstrong's two sons, Rick and Mark, decided to disperse the mbadive collection of their father, who died in August 2012, which represents more than two thousand objects.
Only part of the collection was offered at the sale held on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Dallas but also online.
Two more sales are planned in May and November 2019 by the auction house Heritage Auction, which organized the first.
The souvenir plaque did better than the lot that was expected as the highlight of the sale, namely an American flag taken during the trip to the moon, but never deployed on site.
Larger than most standards brought into space (45 cm by 29), it was sold for $ 275,000, including fees and commissions.
That's more than triple the estimate of Heritage, which valued him $ 75,000.
Also eagerly awaited are two batches of fragments of the Wright brothers' plane, whose first flight, in December 1903, is considered the birth certificate of modern aviation.
These fragments were also taken away by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission and thus have a double historical importance.
They were each sold for $ 275,000, one of which was nine times the original estimate.
In total, the first part of the dispersion of the Armstrong collection has reported $ 5.2 million, said Sunday Heritage Auctions in a statement.
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