Posts: 660
From: Northville MI USA
Registered: Aug 2005

posted 10-19-2011 10:05 PM               

---

Recently the shuttle "coins" came out so I went looking at the plethora of "flown metal" coins from Apollo through the shuttle that are being offered at various sales sites and eBay - I actually have Apollo 8 and Apollo 14 "coins."

Here is one like the Apollo 14 "coin" I own - think I paid $2 for mine. 10,000 grains of silver into the "special melt" certainly seems like only a minute amount would be in each coin produced.

I was wondering, assuming that there is actually an unmeasurable amount of actual flown metal in each "coin" what their value should be as prices seem to vary greatly.

Posts: 427
From: Pampa, TX, US
Registered: May 2011

posted 10-19-2011 11:53 PM               

---

The sad thing is that not long ago at all, there was an eBay seller who was melting the medals into almost unrecognizable sludge (I think he was trying to split them in half) then selling them as flown parts of the spacecraft. I don't know what's worse, selling melted pieces of medals or the fact that people actually bought it.

Personally, I own the STS-88 bronze medal (I used to have another although it's probably lost forever) which I got for $10. I agree that if you were to base the price on flown metal content, I doubt it would add much value at all. Although of course, that's not how the medals are advertised and as such, some people try to milk the novelty of being minted with flown material quite a bit.