Neil Armstrong was most famous for landing on the moon with fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969, and after his 2012 death, his wife made an amazing discovery in one of the bags he had actually brought to the moon with him.
Armstrong’s widow, Carol, emailed the Apollo curator at the National Air and Space Museum to let him know what she had found in their home. According to Collect Space, it was a bag which he had taken to the moon and was full of parts to the space craft that brought him on his lunar journey.
“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,” Allan Needell wrote in a blog on Friday. “Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting.”
Exciting indeed. The bag was nicknamed the “McDivitt purse” after the Apollo 9 astronaut who suggested it be brought aboard Apollo 11 and had been kept a secret by Armstrong until the day he died. Armstrong never even mentioned the historic artifacts to his authorized biographer while they worked on his story.
According to Collect Space:
“Its contents, identified by Needell and the team behind the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, included Armstrong’s waist tether, utility lights and their brackets, equipment netting, an emergency wrench, the optical sight that was mounted above Armstrong’s window and the 16mm data acquisition camera (DAC) that recorded the now iconic footage of the lander’s final approach and Armstrong’s descent down the ladder to take his “small step” onto the moon.”
According to Needell, the most important piece of history in the bag is the camera that filmed their iconic moonwalk. Given the images it captured, Needell said it’s “enormously important” to the history of the space program.
As of now, the bag and its contents are on loan to the Smithsonian from the Armstrong estate, but Armstrong’s widow intends on donated the items to the museum eventually. She also offered a large portion of her mementos from her late husband to the museum to put on display.
Two of the historic artifacts have been put on loan to the National Air and Space Museum as a part of its new exhibition. The data camera and the tether will be on display through June within the featured “Outside the Spacecraft: 50 Years of Extra-Vehicular Activity” exhibit.
It’s undoubtedly cool that Armstrong held on to such historic artifacts without telling anyone for so long. The camera alone is priceless, let alone the pieces he brought with him on his lunar voyage.