Dec 15, 2010

Posted by in NASA, current, history, moon

4 Sale: Moonship & Dairy Queen

An ad in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention. Someone is selling a boilerplate Apollo command module. Unless it’s a scam, it seems to be a real Apollo spacecraft, used for testing recovery procedures. Oh, and it comes with an extra: a Dairy Queen in Franklin, PA.

WSJ ad for Apollo spacecraft and Dairy Queen

Yeah, it’s strange…but a real interesting artifact. The price seems a bit high: the reserve price is $1 million dollars. I’m not sure what the Dairy Queen is worth, but I think the command module is certainly worth no more than $200,000 at the high end. It’s a pretty great thing…but perhaps too pricey. (For me, anyway!)

There’s a listing for it on eBay. I presume the link will stop working sometime after the sale (or failure to sell) less than five days from now.

According to the eBay listing: “The Apollo command module boilerplate is made of boilerplate steel. It was designed to simulate the external physical characteristics and weight of an Apollo command module. Internal features are not representative of an actual command module. Weighing about 9,000 lbs, the boilerplate was used by Navy recovery personnel to train for flotation collar installation and shipboard retrieval procedures. Boilerplates equipped with a recovery training beacon and flashing light were also used by helicopter crews for homing practice.”

The condition is listed as “used”; manufactured by North American Aviation—the company which built the Apollo command  modules; and it notes that shipping for the 9,000 pound spacecraft is not included in the price.

The Dairy Queen seats 114. The population of Franklin, PA is 6,613.

  • The Vision

    The writer should use Ebay’s “conact seller” feature to ask how the capsule made its way from the Navy to the owner.

  • drasil

    hey ray.

    I know I’m a little late to this party, but I ate at this DQ while on my way to shoot a documentary on Oil City, PA in 1999. and yes, as far as I could tell, the testing module is 100% authentic. before we went and sat down at the gull-wing prop plane group table (as pictured in the photos of the interior on eBay), I asked the girl behind the counter about the module, but she didn’t know anything about it other than to tell us the owner was “crazy.”

    there is a 70s “aviation fantasy” theme to the place. the big propeller on the prop plane table really spins. it’s a shame that it looks like it’s no longer in operation from the photos; the whole affair is/was pretty wild.