Jim Toomey has a weakness for space memorabilia, but he doesn’t have unlimited funds. So he had to keep his desires in check as he perused an online auction of NASA relics in May 2012. The Bradenton, Florida, entrepreneur mustered the self-discipline to skip the $53,758 baggie from Apollo 15 that had once held lunar dust, as was well the Gemini 5 log book that went for $33,844. He instead scooped up what he terms “a whole bunch of space junk.” His haul included a dented bracket from a Space Shuttle’s tail fin ($240), a spacesuit’s heater cable ($240), and four reels of 16-mm film that were advertised as having something to do with Viking, the 1970s NASA program that landed America’s first two spacecraft on Mars ($360).
Toomey promptly donated all his NASA curios to the South Florida Museum, where he served as a trustee. Though the museum appreciated the gifts, it deemed them too offbeat for public display. Instead they wound up in a box on a backroom storage shelf, amid a sea of other forgotten artifacts.
Toomey didn’t give the space junk another thought until September 2015, when he received an odd phone call from the Boston auction house that had sold him the goods. The caller said the company had been contacted by an engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Rob Manning who was desperate to locate the Viking films. According to Manning, NASA had discarded the reels by accident; they’d been left in a file cabinet marked for sale as government surplus during an office move in 1999.
Toomey agreed to speak to Manning and assured him that the objects had been preserved rather than melted down for their silver. During that conversation, a grateful Manning revealed why...