There was a time when nobody would have put money on the United States to win the space race. When the Soviets launched Sputnik into orbit on October 4, 1957, Americans reacted like any sophisticated, high-tech society would, pulling the children into the house, donning enchanted headdresses, and performing anti-Sputnik dances around the village campfire at night. In the years that followed, the Soviets continued to leave the Americans in the celestial dust, successfully placing the first dog in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space, and later performing the first space walk, the first space jog, sprint, arabesque, and plié.
Those days, however, are gone: the Soviets conceded the race long ago, and in the last few years the Soviet Union itself has gone the way of the air traffic controllers' union, while the Red Menace has proved less threatening than Dennis. As communism has collapsed across Europe and Asia, and Russian currency has been recycled into Post-it Notes and moist towelettes, the space program has become a luxury Russia can barely afford. That does not mean, however, that there is not still cash to be made in the space business. Last December 11, Sotheby's auction house in New York conducted the largest--nay, only--sale of space memorabilia since the dawn of the satellite age. Put on the block that day were 235 relics of the Soviet space program, ranging from photographs to space suits to whole space capsules. Sotheby's and the former Soviets had hoped to raise between $5 million and $7 million from the sale; when the last gavel fell on the last item, over $6.8 million had changed hands.
The idea of putting relics of the Russian space race on the block was the brainchild of David Redden, a senior vice president of Sotheby's. Redden had been reading an article about a company that was selling the services of Russian rocket-launching facilities when it occurred to him that if marketing the use of space hardware could bring in money, marketing the hardware itself could bring in even more. Working with Peter Batkin, a director of Sotheby's London office and a man who has traveled extensively through Russia hunting for Soviet souvenirs, Redden flew to Moscow and invited cosmonauts, engineers, and others connected with the space program to bring him any cosmic keepsakes for an appraisal.
