?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(SCIENCE.) Apollo 16--A Black Experience on the Moon. Photograph, 16 x 18½ inches; moderate wrinkling, minor wear; signed in ink by noted NASA scientist George R. Carruthers below the center image. Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, circa 1972
A photographic collage of 9 images from Apollo 16, the fifth of six manned lunar landings. It includes 4 images of Black scientists and NASA staff at work. The central image is of NASA engineer Dr. George Carruthers, a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, who developed an ultraviolet camera and spectrograph for use by astronauts on the lunar surface. Carruthers later explained that "this was the first time that the Earth had been photographed from a distance in ultraviolet light, so that you could see the full extent of the hydrogen atmosphere." We find only one other Carruthers signature at auction, in a Swann space sale, 18 March 2006, lot 378. Other images show men at the controls at the Goddard and Kennedy Space Centers and at Mission Control. They are not identified in the image, but cropped pencil notes on verso name them as Morton, Prince, and William Wallace.
With--a NASA press photo of Carruthers and his spectrograph, 10 x 7¾ inches, 8 June 1972.
