posted 08-08-2017 09:59 PM               

My dad started his career after Caltech working with Wernher von Braun in White Sands, New Mexico on the Corporal and Sargent missiles. He them managed virtually all of JPL's unmanned space missions from the 1950s to the 1980s. He directed the first soft landing on the moon (Surveyor 1), the first mission to another planet (Mariner) and the Voyagers. When he retired he was Deputy Director of JPL. Here is a film JPL/NASA did on him:

posted 08-08-2017 11:14 PM            

Am not a registered appraiser but assuming that you have his various paper 8x10 certificates and commendations, employee badges, his 10 year, 20 year, etc. gold JPL award pins, his retirement ceremony photo notebook, along with all that you have mentioned; am guessing that collection together could be worth well above a quarter million depending on the actual spacecraft artifacts and flown items.

Now if you could talk someone into a book deal about his fabulous life testing rockets with the Army and von Braun in New Mexico and then moving over to the Jet Propulsion Lab in SoCal, that above dollar amount number would be dwarfed.

posted 08-09-2017 01:47 AM               

Secondly, Cozmosis22: A quarter million? Whaaat?

The collections of most long term NASA employees (including management), including all certificates, commendations, awards, badges, pins, photos, and a few shuttle flown flags are worth a few hundred dollars at most, maybe $1,000+ if they have more than the average number of flags.

If they were lucky enough to get some Apollo flown flags, which was really very rare even for those who worked from Mercury through Apollo, then the number can go up into the few thousands. Throw in an Apollo 11 flown flag (extremely rare) and you're into a few tens of thousands.

posted 08-09-2017 05:48 AM               

You'll find there's some really smart and helpful people here. Great place for info.

That being said though, you do need to have it appraised. As I think you've gathered, the monetary value will depend on what you have. Personal items tend to have lower values because they are personal. For example, signed photos are worth more with just the autograph. If they were signed addressed to someone ("Best of luck, John! And the signature), that tends to distract from the value if/when sold.

posted 08-09-2017 01:06 PM               

I would catalog the collection, especially flown items and flags and other flown items, and then post it here and some opinions can be given. I do not know anyone who could appraise it unfortunately.

posted 08-09-2017 02:06 PM            

Well, we're taking about the totality of a lifetime collection as kept intact and the estimated value is for insurance purposes. This is an example of a situation where the total is greater than the sum of its parts.

posted 08-09-2017 05:03 PM               

I just completed a space appraisal visit this afternoon on the Florida Space Coast and have done countless others since the Apollo era (altogether probably hundreds by now in all categories since the 1970s).

Secondly, for John, yes I know about your father, Robert J. Parks, from my early space age collecting years.

Your dad has always been very kind to me when writing letters to him at JPL. As a teenager, and later in my early 20's, I would ask questions and request of him autographs for my own space probe collection of signed Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner and Voyager photos and cachet postal covers.

One of my all-time favorite space memorabilia pieces, John, came from your father as well. When he was the Assistant JPL Director for Lunar and Planetary Projects in Dec. 1962, he gifted an original Mariner II telemetry strip of letters and numbers all crunched-up together to another space collector, of which later, I was able to acquire from him.

Of course you can't make any sense of the message whatsoever, but what it represented — in it's original paper content — was proof of a transmitted telemetry message that Mariner II had achieved the first successful planetary encounter of a robotic space probe!

That historic space feat took place on Dec. 14, 1962, when the NASA planetary spacecraft got within 22,000 miles of Venus. Much of it was made possible by the leadership of "Spock," — Robert J. Parks, along with the entire JPL team.

posted 08-09-2017 10:47 PM               

For me I have many items I'd never part with, but I also have boxes of other stuff that may be of interest to some collectors.