Apollo astronauts tell NASA 'hands off our artifacts'
Published: Sunday, January 15, 2012, 6:34 AM
By Lee Roop, The Huntsville Times
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A Nov. 23, 2011 file photo released by Heritage Auctions shows a a key page from the Apollo 13 Lunar Module Checklist with handwriting by Commander James Lovell. The list shows calculations made by Commander James Lovell that helped him and his crew navigate the damaged aircraft back to earth. (Heritage Auctions/AP/File)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - It's an Apollo astronaut's flight checklist, but not just any astronaut and not just any flight. Still, when a bidder at a Texas auction offered $388,000 in November for James Lovell's Apollo 13 checklist, even the auction house was surprised. The final bid was 15 times the pre-auction estimate.
Perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising. Lovell used the checklist and did handwritten math on it as he fought to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely home after an explosion in their spacecraft in 1970. Tom Hanks used a prop checklist like it when he played Lovell in the movie "Apollo 13."
Lovell, who has donated other memorabilia to museums and charities, said he found the checklist recently while cleaning out some files and thought someone might want it. Lovell's checklist wasn't the only item questioned in the November auction. NASA also asked for proof of ownership of a lunar module identification plate and a command module hand controller from Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.
Lovell told Fox News last week, in the only interview astronauts have given on what is now a full-blown artifact controversy, that NASA knew Apollo-era astronauts took "flight manuals and artifacts." Other times, NASA gave items to the astronauts, Lovell said.
A few days after the auction, a NASA attorney wrote Heritage Auction Galleries asking for proof of ownership of the questioned items. "Only NASA has the authority to clear NASA property for sale," counsel Donna Shaffer wrote, according to the gallery.
That attitude is modern NASA thinking. Rules for what astronauts can and can't do have gotten tighter in every area since Apollo.
The Texas gallery followed its normal procedure and put the Lovell checklist and the other items in a vault pending a resolution. That may take awhile. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., himself a former astronaut, met with Lovell and other Apollo astronauts last week.
Bolden wanted to make sure the astronauts knew he wants to work this out and knows "they had the best of intentions in their activities," NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said Thursday. NASA and the astronauts call the affair a "misunderstanding."
So now NASA goes to its files, trying to find something that backs up the astronauts' memories. What it decides could affect museums and charities who have benefited from astronaut donations in the past, some believe.
"Questioning that title brings into question all of those activities," Robert Pearlman, editor of the website collectspace.com, said Thursday. Pearlman has written extensively about the artifacts issue.
The astronauts are unanimous that "these were items they didn't take, but were given," Pearlman said. Unfortunately, written records at the time were kept private by Apollo-era astronaut office director Deke Slayton, also a former astronaut.
"Because they were considered personal souvenirs, he decided they were not meant for public eyes," Pearlman said, "so he set a policy that the list would not be distributed to the public or the press."
Slayton acknowledged the list and the tradition of astronaut gifts and souvenirs in interviews before his death, Pearlman said, but he cannot speak now.
"We feel pretty strongly about who owns it," Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 astronaut and the last man to walk on the moon, said in the Fox interview. "It's an impingement on our personal integrity," Cernan said of any suggestion astronauts are improperly selling government property. "I resent that."
The November auction isn't the first time NASA has intervened in sales. Among other incidents, it sued Apollo 14 crew member Edgar Mitchell to re-claim a camera Mitchell brought back from the moon and planned to sell for $80,000.
But if Mitchell hadn't brought the camera back, NASA's first flight director, Christopher Kraft, said last week it would have been destroyed when astronauts purposely crashed the spacecraft to which it was attached into the moon.
NASA began tightening control of "flown" artifacts after a "stamp scandal" in which the crew of Apollo 15 was censured for taking stamps into space specifically to give to a dealer when they returned, Kraft said. He remembers the Apollo15 investigation and its aftermath.
"When we began to look into it, we were damned sorry we did," Kraft said last week by telephone from his home in Texas. "There was too much there ... so we, NASA, dropped (it)."
The Apollo 15 crew later sued NASA for return of the stamps after NASA itself cooperated with the U.S. Postal Service on a program to fly stamps on the space shuttle and sell them, and the astronauts won the stamps back in an out-of-court settlement. To Kraft's mind, that set a precedent.
By the space shuttle era, detailed rules spelled out what the astronauts could take into space and take home, remembers Dr. Jan Davis of Huntsville, an astronaut in the late 1980s and '90s.
"When I was flying, everything that was the government's had to be donated to the Smithsonian (Institution)," Davis said Friday. That included checklists and flight suits.
Shuttle astronauts were allowed to fly two small personal packets, she said. One, the Official Flight Kit, could contain up to 10 items for donation to organizations, such as flags for schools. A second Personal Flight Kit could contain small items such as jewelry. "That's all we were allowed to keep, plus our shirts," Davis said.
Davis and former astronaut Owen Garriott, also a Huntsville resident, declined to discuss the current situation. Both said they had been following it, but not closely enough to comment.
Kraft said he remembers the early NASA policy. Astronauts were given, or could take, small personal items and things such as mission checklists after a flight, but they did not have approval to take any piece of hardware they wanted as a souvenir. The items they did get were to be for themselves and family, not to be sold.
Kraft said he's sure other NASA employees, such as "my people, the flight control world," are angry "to a fare-the-well that these guys are selling this stuff." But Kraft sees the astronauts' point of view, too. "They don't make any money, even now, so what's wrong with them selling this hardware or whatever that was actually given to them by NASA?"
If its comes down to astronauts proving ownership, Kraft and experts such as Pearlman and Ed Stewart, curator of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, say it could be done. Maybe. In some cases.
Pearlman said photographs, NASA files and other documents can clear up questions about some items, but not all. And not all items are the same. To illustrate the complications facing NASA now, Stewart wondered aloud, "Would this checklist be treated differently if it were the Apollo 14 checklist?"
As a factual matter, he said, the Lovell checklist is a paper product. "If you look at what it cost to produce, it would be well under the standards they would usually keep up with. There might have been 500 copies of that checklist ... you could almost consider it as if NASA went out and bought a box of pens."
Take a pen and you won't get a letter from a NASA lawyer, Stewart said, even if you sell it. It's clearly the "critical history" that made Lovell's checklist valuable, Stewart said. And Lovell himself contributed to that value.
"Astronauts have been selling checklists and pages of checklists for 20 years," Pearlman said, "and NASA hasn't objected to any of those until now. So, what sets this one apart? If it's only the price being paid, that shouldn't matter to NASA."
"That's what Mr. Bolden is going to have to decide," Kraft said. "What is allowable and what is not. I think he's going to find that very difficult to do."
The first step is digging deeply into NASA's files, curator Stewart said. But he added, "I'm sure it will eventually come down to a battle of lawyers."
Even if Bolden wants to decide in the astronauts' favor, Pearlman said, he may not be able to. An independent watchdog office inside NASA, the Office of the Inspector General, could decide to go after valuable property that once belonged to NASA no matter what Bolden wants.
Congress could "pass a bill saying these were awarded to the astronauts," Pearlman said, "but that would require a lot of collaboration on the part of the House and Senate." One might think even today's divided Congress could agree on how to treat national heroes, but Pearlman noted it took three years for Congress to agree to give medals to the crew of Apollo 11. And that was the flight that first landed men on the moon.
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