One giant leap for the National Air and Space Museum's collection
Neil Armstrong’s widow recently discovered a white purse in the closet of her Cincinnati home, specially designed for space flight and packed with souvenirs from Armstrong’s moon landing in 1969.
Carol Armstrong reported the historic find to the National Air and Space Museum, which unveiled new details about the bag’s contents in a blog post this week. Among the 20 items Armstrong stowed in the bag was the original 16 mm movie camera he used to record the first steps on the moon, an emergency wrench, a power cable and a helmet strap.
“Odds and ends,” he called them in a transmission to mission control, but for a curator at Air and Space Museum, the items took on a more significant meaning decades later. “It is hard to imagine anything more exciting,” wrote Allan Needell of the museum’s Space History Department.
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