Christmas gifts for the space cadet in your life

Christmas is only two weeks away, and it’s panic all round as shoppers scramble to find last- minute gifts. You’ve scoured the planet for the perfect present, but maybe it’s time to look elsewhere for inspiration. With the countdown to December 25th under way, you need to launch a serious shopping mission, all the way to outer space.

Space artefacts and space flight memorabilia are big business, and at this time of the year there’s an explosion of interest in anything that’s either out of this world, or at least has spent some time out of this world. From meteorite fragments to spacecraft parts and from astronauts’ gloves to cosmonauts’ badges, the space memorabilia industry has taken off, and collectors and enthusiasts are willing to pay big money for the ultimate space souvenir (and websites willing to charge accordingly).

There are plenty of astro-Amazons online, but anyone with a real interest in the history of space travel should make their first landing on collectspace.com, run by Robert Pearlman, a journalist and acknowledged authority on space-related goodies.

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$295: Signed portrait of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space (autograph out of shot)

So, what can you buy online from outer space? How about a 9.7kg iron meteorite fragment, which is a snip at $7,500 from thespaceshop.com? If that's outside your budget, you can buy a checklist flown on Apollo 13, and signed by commander James Lovell (he was played by Tom Hanks in the movie, if that makes it more attractive), price $1,995 from spaceflori.com. For a stocking filler, how about a washer from the Challenger space shuttle, in its own presentation package with a numbered certificate of authenticity, for just $79, also from spaceflori.com? Sounds like a bargain, but note that this particular washer did not come from the shuttle's ill-fated final flight; any debris from the Challenger disaster in 1986 is the property of the US government.

Space treasure or junk?

Are these genuine treasures or just overpriced space junk?

“Certainly there’s a big market for collectors,” says David Moore of Astronomy Ireland. “My problem is I’m not really a collector. I try to declutter things, I’m more of a minimalist. We have telescopes galore, and I have two main ones which I use, and that’s it. If someone gave me a piece of an old rocket, I’d use it as a paperweight.”

But many collectors do feel the need to pay big money for small, shapeless rock formations from outer space.

“There was a big fireball seen over Ireland in November 1999, and the meteorite from it was found in Carlow. A collector bought it from the lady who found it, and later he was selling pieces of it on his website for $500 a gram, which at the time was 50 times the price of gold,” says Moore.

Artefacts from the Apollo missions have proven to be enduring favourites. Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, the fourth person to walk on the moon, left Nasa to become a painter, and incorporated moon dust and fragments of foil from the command module into his paintings. Well, it beats elephant dung.

“Those missions were unique,” says Moore. “There were over 100 space shuttle missions, and over 500 people in space. But only 12 people walked on the moon, and 24 who went as far as the moon, and of all the billions of people who have lived, that makes them unique. And it’s also part of history. Whatever amount of watches or manifests they took up, that’s it. It’s a fixed number and that makes them collectible.”

“Certainly stuff that’s been flown on the International Space Station is two a penny,” says science broadcaster Leo Enright, chair of the Government’s Discover Science and Engineering programme. Memorabilia from historic Russian space programmes, however, are in demand. “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union an awful lot of Russian stuff has been appearing.”

Some collectors will go to great lengths to own a piece of space. In 1993, computer gaming entrepreneur Richard Garriot (the son of an astronaut) bought a Russian Lunokhod 2 moon rover at a Sotheby's auction for $68,000. If he wants to display it in his living room, he'll have to fly to the moon to fetch it.

“The one thing that will land you in jail if you buy it is moon rock,” says Enright. “It is a federal offence to sell or buy moon rock because it was brought back from the moon at American taxpayers’ expense, so it’s viewed as the property of the American government.”

That didn’t stop Nasa interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany Fowler from stealing 101 grams of moon rock worth about $5 million from the Johnson Space Centre in 2002 and trying to flog it. The pair were caught by an FBI sting operation.

To anyone thinking of shelling out astronomical amounts for a cosmic gift, Enright has this advice: “The rules of the game are the same on Mars as they are on Earth: buyer beware.”

GET THEE TO CORK: IRELAND’S CHRISTMAS ‘STAR’

You might have noticed a dazzlingly bright star briskly traversing the sky these past few evenings, and thought maybe you’d been drinking too much mulled wine at your Christmas do. Don’t worry, it’s not the Star of Bethlehem, it’s the International Space Station orbiting the Earth with six astronauts on board, and it will be visible over Irish skies several times between now and St Stephen’s Day.

“The first few paths are a bit low down and the last few are too, but the middle paths are superb, and when it flies across it’s almost overhead, and if you’re in Cork it’s directly overhead,” says David Moore of Astronomy Ireland. “It’s the brightest thing in the sky by a factor of nearly 100. It’s about 400km up in the sky, and it’s going at seven or eight kilometres a second, so at that distance it looks about the same speed as a high-flying jet going by.”

If you want to catch the ISS in full flight, Astronomy Ireland will have predicted sighting times on its website astronomy.ie.