Now, Christie's East is re-entering the market on May 9 with an auction of 350 items from astronauts and private collectors: maps sprinkled with lunar dust, emblems, Yuri Gagarin's report on his first space flight and five spacesuits, including the Gemini Extravehicular Activity model, left, used for training in 1966.
It makes less sense today when astronauts wear nappies and are strapped into their three layer spacesuits, which are then sealed and leak tested before they get on the bus.
At 10am UK time, two men in spacesuits clambered through an airlock and for the first time set foot on a sandy red surface strewn with boulders.
Since opening in 1972, the museum has been home to a slew of Armstrong memorabilia, including the Gemini VIII spacecraft he piloted back in 1966, two of his spacesuits, and a moon rock from the Apollo 11 mission.
Black-and-white footage shows two lumbering men in spacesuits awkwardly trying to get a waist-high flagpole to stand up in the moon dust.
Somehow, I knew that the hazy black-and-white images of two men in gleaming spacesuits were important.
The following morning, Valery Bykovsky, Aleksei Yeliseev, and Yevgeny Khrunov would launch in Soyuz 2. Komarov in the more sophisticated spacecraft would rendezvous and dockwith Soyuz 2. Two cosmonauts would don spacesuits and transfer from Soyuz 2 to Soyuz 1 by spacewalk and the restructured crews would return from orbit.
To enable spacewalks, Salyut 6 was equipped with an inward-opening EVA hatch on the side of the forward transfer compartment, which could be used as an airlock in a similar way to the system used on Salyut 4. This compartment contained two new semi-rigid spacesuits which allowed much greater flexibility than earlier suits, and could be donned within five minutes in case of an emergency.
"I watched the spacesuit one last night," Ive told André.
