Camera Used by Astronauts on Moon "Pulls $940 Gs" at Auction
Baku, March 30 (AZERTAC). Apollo relic was one of a kind due to later weight policies
Westlicht Photographica Auction house in Vienna, Austria saved a whopper of an item for its 25th Anniversary Auction. The auction house sold one of the only cameras used by a human on the moon, and then returned to Earth. The camera sold for €682,000, roughly $940,720 USD at current exchange rates.
I. A Camera Worthy of the Moon
Swedish specialty camera maker Hasselblad AB manufactured the rare model. Hasselblad's roots trace back to World War II, where its founder Victor Hasselblad -- an expert optical engineer -- was contracted by the Swedish government to study a captured camera from a Nazi spy-plane. The Swedish Air Force requested that he reverse engineer the camera, but Victor Hasselblad, as legend goes, did a step better assessing the design and then producing a superior model from the lessons learned.
Fast forward two decades and mankind was preparing to take its first steps on the Moon with the Apollo program. The Swedish camera maker had achieved international acclaim as an unmatched provider of quality scientific cameras, and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contracts Mr. Hasselblad to produce a camera worthy of a Moon mission. The Hasselblad 500 'EL DATA CAMERA HEDC' (HEDC == "Hasselblad Electronic Data Camera") was born.
In 1969, NASA launched Apollo 15, the fourth manned lunar mission. The mission was the first to test the Lunar rover, and astronaut Colonel James Benson "Jim" Irwin took the Hasselblad 500 along for the ride. From July 26th to August 7th, 1971 Col. Irwin used the camera to capture 299 photographs on the Moon and 96 more during the flight to the Moon and on the return flight home.
That alone makes the camera an important piece of history, but what made it even more valuable was that it was one of the few cameras to be taken home by the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked the moon.
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