ELEANOR S. ARMSTRONG* AND JORDAN BIMM** The Trouble with Space Auctions On July 20, 2021, Sotheby’s, the storied centuries-old auction house, promised collectors the Moon—or at least the chance to bid on items involved in getting there. Among the eighty-seven lots up for sale was an Apollo Guidance Com- puter. This metallic box, designed by MIT’s Instrument Laboratory and pro- duced by Raytheon starting in 1966, was an essential tool for navigating the lunar surface and an important forerunner of modern computing. Sotheby’s estimated that this celebrated artifact—frequently studied not only in space history but also in the history of technology—would fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 USD. But when the auctioneer’s hammer hit the lectern, the price had skyrocketed to $746,000 USD. Other items on the block that day included a lunar surface checklist used by Neil Armstrong (sold for $63,000 USD) and Richard Feynman’s personal notes from the Challenger disaster investigation (sold for $44,100 USD). In case there was any doubt, Sotheby’s sale affirmed the value of almost anything to do with space. But here the public record for these items stops. Who purchased these artifacts and where they now reside is a mystery. How should we attend to this systematic and accelerating flow of space artifacts into unknown private collections of the fantastically wealthy? How does the commodification of and marketplace for space-flown items affect and implicate historians and curators and their contributions to space history? And finally, how do these processes shape public and expert understandings of outer space and its uses? Critical * Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Teaching and Learning, Stockholm University, Institutionen fo ¨r a ¨mnesdidaktik 106 91 Stockholm, eleanor.armstrong@su.se ** Assistant Instructional Professor of Science Communication and Public Discourse, University of Chicago, 5737 S. University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, jordanbimm@uchicago.edu | 425 Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 53, Number 4, pps. 425–433. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic ISSN 1939-182X.  2023 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www. ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425. http://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article-pdf/53/4/425/791375/hsns.2023.53.4.425.pdf?casa_token=Xrqn5tjavEcAAAAA:71MyJIHuRiphNpHZmULCOFKE0Rtfsxf5w-BYt92pTKmk1fmnDf-FFUFaHliNiLD5D1ud-cIXX1Q by University of Chicago user on