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Robert Pearlman, the 33 year old collector who runs CollectSPACE, caught the bug from Havekotte. Pearlman saw a story about the collector in a newspaper, his artifacts arrayed behind him, and sent the older man a letter. It just so happened that Havekotte had a long standing policy of providing a "free packet of space goodies to avid space fans," and so one day a package showed up at Pearlman's door. "I wrote to him and said, 'How do I get started in this?' And he sent me a big box of stuff," Pearlman said. "I still have most of the contents of that box. I was 13 or 14 years old." Alongside the collectibles was a piece of wisdom that helped Pearlman find his particular niche. "It had a note from him that said to look through the box, find what excites me, and then specialize," Pearlman said. "What really struck my fancy were the small bits and pieces that had been in space. A couple tiny little pieces of the Apollo 13 command module heat shields and some gold-covered foil that had covered the Soyuz test module." Pearlman had discovered that he was a hardware man. The jewel of Pearlman's collection is a hatch manufactured for the International Space Station -- "a 4-foot-by-4-foot, 200-pound aircraft-grade piece of aluminum" -- which one of his collector buddies found at a recycling center in Alabama. "He called me and said, 'You won't believe what I found.' I had it trucked down to Houston, where I am," Pearlman said. "I live on the third floor of a walkup. I had to call four companies to find someone who was willing to help me move it."
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