RICK: Hey. How's it going?
MIKE: Oh, good. How are you?
What have we got here?
MIKE: That's a piece of Apollo 13 heat shield.
Dallas, we have a problem.
It's Houston.
[chuckles]
Texas, isn't it?
[laughs]
MIKE: I decided to come to the pawn shop
today to sell my piece of Apollo 13 heat shield.
I think it's priceless actually, but I'm thinking somewhere
around $50,000, $60,000.
Where in the world did you get that?
MIKE: My father was a model maker for NASA.
And when they would get the capsules back,
they would encapsulate them like this,
and they'd give them to whoever could hit the budget for NASA.
I think it's pretty cool because it's been in space.
RICK: The fact that a piece of Apollo 13
might be sitting in my store right now blows my mind.
Apollo 13 wasn't a huge deal.
We had already landed on the Moon twice.
But then something went catastrophically wrong.
There was an explosion inside the oxygen tank,
and they had to MacGyver everything back together
and get back to Earth.
Apollo 13 is an incredible story.
James Lovell and the rest of the astronauts
should have never made it back alive.
They were literally using a sextant
to navigate by the stars to get back to the Earth.
CHUMLEE: What do you need heat tiles on a rocket for?
It's going so fast that the air rubbing against the side
of the capsule creates so much heat from friction,
the aluminum will melt, if it's just bare aluminum.
There's no paperwork or anything with it?
MIKE: Nope.
They just give it to you like this?
Is it written on it anywhere? MIKE: Nope.
RICK: I just don't know if this is something your dad made
in his garage, put in some lucite, and said,
hey, look, son, a piece of a rocket.
[laughs]
You can tell what kind of father he was.
[laughter]
RICK: If you don't mind, a friend of mine's
a curator of an aerospace museum.
So-- MIKE: OK.
--he knows everything there is to know about this stuff.
Let me have him take a look at it,
and then we'll try and figure out a price, OK?
OK. RICK: All right.
Sounds great. RICK: Sounds great.
Thank you. [cash register chiming]
MARK: So what do we have?
MIKE: That's a piece of Apollo 13 heat shield.
MARK: I'm the administrator of the Clark County Museum,
the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum,
and the Searchlight Community Museum
down in Searchlight, Nevada.
With Apollo 13, one of the things that happened
is, you know, the oxygen tank blew up.
That was the one that didn't make it to the Moon
and just barely made it back.
But on that one, they kept the service module attached
to the command module because they were
worried about the heat shield.
One of the things that they were worried might have happened
when the oxygen tank blew up is that it might
have damaged the heat shield.
If it had, everybody was dead.
MIKE: It did make it to the Moon though, or they did--
MARK: Well, it went around the Moon.
- Right. - It never came down.
They had to.
In order for them to get back to Earth, they had to keep going,
go around the Moon, and slingshot back to the Earth.
Apollo 13 had to do all kinds of technological work
during the flight just to be able to survive.
It's probably one of the most interesting missions,
certainly the most dangerous.
The thing about this on an Apollo, like on a Gemini,
this was not individual tiles.
On this, the whole heat shield worked
as a unit for dissipating the temperature
that was being built up as the capsule came back in.
They didn't know on Apollo 13 until they
came back in whether or not the heat shield was intact.
RICK: Just imagine yourself stranded in space
and somehow getting yourself back to Earth,
and then having no idea whether the heat shield
was going to hold up or not.
Unbelievable what these guys went through.
So it's definitely a heat shield off an Apollo mission?
MARK: It seems right to me that it is part of the heat shield.
But unfortunately, because they took these out
of all of the missions--
MIKE: Right.
--I don't know of any way of saying that this was Apollo 13
if it wasn't marked or you don't have
something from your father.
If there was some way to prove it was from Apollo 13,
there would be a lot of collectors out there for it?
MARK: Yes. It would be huge.
OK. All right.
You're the best.
Thank you.
All right, this is my favorite part.
RICK: So how much did you want for it?
Well, I wouldn't be willing to take
anything less than $50,000.
Oh, no. $50,000 is not going to happen.
There's collectors out there, but there's only-- they're only
willing to spend so much money.
So I'm figuring I'd give you like $2,000 for it.
I'd be willing to come down on it to $30,000, $35,000,
but other-- any lower than that, I'd just
prefer to keep it in my family.
RICK: Yeah, I couldn't come near that price.
To tell you the truth, we're just so far apart,
it's just not going to happen.
Yeah.
I appreciate you bringing it in though.
Thanks. MIKE: Thank you.
They made an offer, and it wasn't
a good enough offer for me, so it was very
easy to walk away from $2,000.