They would be "coins" if they were issued by a country & stating a monitary value. Lacking an issuing country & monetary value, they would be medals (or tokens). Countries like the Isle of Man have issued "coins" with a space theme. NASA has issued some very collectable & valuable medals. There are a huge number of privately issued medals commemorating space stuff. Collecting privately issued space medals is popular but I don't know of any complete catalog or price list. I've got some photos of my space medals on my other computer. I'll track them down & post them tomorrow. Good night for now.
Right, those four are probably medals. Would have been interesting to see the other side, but I doubt they were issued by any government. As for space coins, here is one from Germany by the way ... Christian
There isn't much of a description of the "coins" (which, as someone else has already pointed out, are probably actually medals) except that they are "95% silver" which is an odd fineness (purity). The picture is rather poor and there are no pictures of the other side of the medals. There is also no mention of weight. A bid of $160 for this set of 4 seems rather high to me, since I doubt that they are coins and they probably don't weigh more than an ounce apiece, which means that the silver value would be around $110 at most. Also, "limited edition" is pretty meaningless outside the context of official government issue, and the term itself could mean "1,000", "10,000" or even "100,000" or anything else, for that matter.
The linked auction coins are Marshall Islands 50$. .9990 silver, .9980 asw. Melt exceeds their catalog value of 16.50-27.50. They usually ebay for a couple dollars over melt. Current bid of $160 is much too high.
This is a small rocket engine from the Apollo project. It controlled the position of the command module.
When it was no longer classified, employees were allowed to take some display & test items home. I ended up getting a control rocket valve (true production hardware) that had passed about a hundred tests but never flew. I also got the depicted engine which was cut in half for display. There was a secretary in advanced projects that wore rocket engine earrings at the office. The engines were about the size of your thumb. She would keep her earrings locked at the office file cabinet each night & put them on every morning. She got tired of it quickly. Back in the day, USA security was very strict. Today, you can find most of those secret rockets on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
One of our esteemed members on the NGC forums has one of the largest collections I've ever seen only everything in his collection was actually carried aboard the various Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions. Chris
