New space race to buy first cosmonaut’s suit

17 October, 2008, 04:12

Prized relics from the Soviet era of space exploration are to be sold at Sothebey's in New York in December. Most of the items are owned by the American billionaire Ross Perot, who bought them at an earlier auction. Russian buyers now have a chance to bring them home.

Soviet Space souvenirs were first sold by Sotheby’s in the early 90s. They include the space suit worn by the first man in space – Yury Gagarin.

There’s also a unique Soviet toilet for spacecrafts, as well as a suit for moonwalks.

Among the items attracting a huge amount of interest from NASA and international museums are diaries and manuals used by the original Soviet cosmonauts.

In the first sale, one man’s millions priced everyone else out of the market. His name was Ross Perot.

“As well as the space race itself, it was a competition between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the USA. Most of the exhibits have since been purchased by America’s famous billionaire and politician Ross Perot,” Mikhail Kamensky, Sotheby's CIS General Director, said.

The businessman understood the historical importance of the documents, for both the Soviet Union and the U.S. But he could hardly have expected the kind of prices they are expected to fetch 15 years later.

“They are really expensive as the interest in space is always high. The most expensive exibit, a report on Gagarin's flight, is estimated at more than a half million dollars,” Kamensky said.

Journalist and space specialist Igor Lisov says the documents themselves don't actually have any value in terms of revealing state secrets as they had been made public long before the U.S. got them.

“As for Gagarin’s post-flight report, it was indeed classified. But by 1991, it was declassified and published. 1993 was a difficult time, especially for engineers and the intelligentsia, so we can hardly blame people who decided to sell the documents that they owned or had access to through Sotheby’s for sums measured in thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars,” Lisov said.

Before going on sale again, the Soviet space relics were put on public show at a space-race exhibition at Washington's national space museum. The coming auction will decide whether they will take flight once again.