What do you think of this fact?
July 20, 1969: The Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had just walked on the Moon. Now they only had to leave again. Then Aldrin spotted something on the cabin floor that should have been on the instrument panel.
A tiny switch, a giant problem
In his book Magnificent Desolation, quoted by HISTORY, Aldrin describes finding a circuit breaker switch lying in the dust on the floor. It had broken off. And not just any switch: this was the engine arm breaker, the one vital breaker needed to send power to the ascent engine that would lift them off the Moon.
How did it happen? Inside the cramped lunar module, the astronauts wore bulky backpacks. Aldrin wrote that he or Armstrong must have bumped the switch by accident. According to ABC Action News, Aldrin struck it with his life support backpack while climbing back in.
Engineering, shoulder-pocket style
Mission Control was informed but, according to HISTORY, still had no solution by the next morning. Aldrin had an idea of his own. He didn’t want to stick his finger or anything metal into an electrical slot, but he had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of his suit. The crew moved their countdown up by a couple of hours, and Aldrin pushed the pen into the opening.
It worked. “Houston says, ‘Oh we’ve got a good complete circuit,’” Aldrin later recalled, as quoted by ABC Action News. Armstrong called the backup “insurance.” The two men lifted off and made it back to Michael Collins in lunar orbit. collectSPACE later called it the problem that almost stranded Armstrong and Aldrin on the lunar surface.
Bonus fact: NASA Chief Historian William Barry told HISTORY that later lunar modules got a guard over those circuit breakers to prevent a similar problem.
Aldrin kept the broken switch and the pen for decades. In July 2026, according to collectSPACE, both sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $857,600. Probably the most expensive doodling tool in history.