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Soviet Space Capsule Fetches Record $2.9 Million at Sotheby’s
By Katya Kazakina - Apr 13, 2011 5:27 AM GMT+0800
Vostok 3KA-2 space capsule at Sotheby's in New York. The spacecraft orbited the Earth as the final test before the former Soviet Union sent the first man into space. Source: Sotheby's via Bloomberg
A Soviet space capsule that orbited the Earth 50 years ago fetched $2.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York today, setting a record for a space ship.
The buyer was Yevgeny Yurchenko, chairman of the Moscow- based investment fund AS Popov, one of only two phone bidders in a packed room that included schoolchildren.
The price surpassed the low end of the lot’s presale estimate of $2 million to $10 million.
The auction was held on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, which marked the first time a human being traveled into outer space.
The Vostok 3KA-2 was the capsule used in the final test before Gagarin’s flight on April 12, 1961. It carried a life- size cosmonaut mannequin and a live dog, and landed safely two hours after launch in a snow-blanketed field about 700 miles from Moscow.
Scorched and scratched on the outside, it is now a giant rusty ball. Most of the interior was taken up by an ejection seat.
Sotheby’s (BID) offered the test capsule in 1996, with an estimate of $800,000 to $1 million. It didn’t sell and was later acquired privately by an anonymous U.S. businessman directly from the Russians, according to Sotheby’s.
(Katya Kazakina is a reporter for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the reporter of this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at [email protected].
