NASA Space Junk Auction
12 images Created 31 Oct 2008
When eccentric NASA inventor Charles Bell died, his rusting collection of space junk was sold at Cape Canaveral, to the amazement of space junk collectors.
There are collectors, and then there was NASA electronics scientist Charles Bell.
He picked up anything, and everything, especially artifacts from NASA dating to the 1960s. One day, he hoped to start a space museum. But the retired 57-year-old NASA design engineer of 37 years died Feb. 16 2000 at his home on Merritt Island, Florida.
Bell's lifelong collecting passion goes public, when his amazing NASA cache and a few other things go to the auction block - at 10 a.m. today in Merritt Island. And to those who knew him, he was a collecting legend.
Charles actually went out to launch sites and cut the pads down," auctioneer Dave Manor of Astor, Fla. said Friday, standing amid mountains of NASA pieces collected by Bell during the last 25 years.
Bell's treasures are not catalogued, or organized. They are just there - thousands of artifacts weighing thousands of tons, worth millions. Lying heaped up in trailers and in the undergrowth, was the testament to Man's quest for space exploration, now rotting as scrap metal. There are two reassembled Atlas rockets and engines and parts from the Saturn, Apollo and Mercury during NASA's early days.
(More text on request).
There are collectors, and then there was NASA electronics scientist Charles Bell.
He picked up anything, and everything, especially artifacts from NASA dating to the 1960s. One day, he hoped to start a space museum. But the retired 57-year-old NASA design engineer of 37 years died Feb. 16 2000 at his home on Merritt Island, Florida.
Bell's lifelong collecting passion goes public, when his amazing NASA cache and a few other things go to the auction block - at 10 a.m. today in Merritt Island. And to those who knew him, he was a collecting legend.
Charles actually went out to launch sites and cut the pads down," auctioneer Dave Manor of Astor, Fla. said Friday, standing amid mountains of NASA pieces collected by Bell during the last 25 years.
Bell's treasures are not catalogued, or organized. They are just there - thousands of artifacts weighing thousands of tons, worth millions. Lying heaped up in trailers and in the undergrowth, was the testament to Man's quest for space exploration, now rotting as scrap metal. There are two reassembled Atlas rockets and engines and parts from the Saturn, Apollo and Mercury during NASA's early days.
(More text on request).
