To the Moon and Back: Here’s The Engagement Ring Made from Apollo 11 and Lunar Meteorite

American jewelers have created a unique engagement ring that contains a piece of the Apollo 11 spaceship and a lunar meteorite. The customer fished for parts for his jewelry at auctions. 

According to the owner of the jewelry company, this piece was the most valuable of all the pieces his team created. The ring’s design was developed over several weeks, and the manufacturing took only 4-5 days.

The Apollo 11 Ring That’s Truly One of a Kind

The jewellery was created by craftsmen at Honest Hands Ring Co., a small company from Morrison, Colorado. Their speciality is bespoke rings for clients worldwide that contain essential items and memorabilia. Jewellers have previously integrated vinyl records, tokens, and even specks of field dirt from baseball games into their jewellery.

‘We’ve made thousands of rings before, but never with something so rare. This was the most stressful ring we’ve ever taken on,’ shared jewellery company owner Ben Bosworth.

Who Is The Lord Of The Ring

The Apollo 11 ring was commissioned by John Mesick, a planning manager at Lockheed Martin, one of the main contractors for NASA’s Artemis programme. Lockheed Martin powers the Orion spacecraft, which is planned to land astronauts on the moon again for the first time in more than 50 years.

According to media reports, Messick dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a child but eventually chose a more traditional path – engineering. He connected himself with the coveted field, albeit without travelling to space.

Details On The Apollo 11 Ring

The centrepiece of the ring’s design was the golden thermal polyamide ribbon that made the first journey with the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Moon in 1969. This fragment, which is 23 centimetres long, was purchased by John Mesick at an auction.

Mesick said that he had been waiting for months for an auction that would allow him to buy a piece of Apollo 11. He admits he ‘overpaid a little bit’ but believes the result was worth it.

It’s a much bigger piece than I needed for the ring, but I will design [the rest of it] in my house. I’ll always treasure it,’ Mesick said in an interview.

Another piece is a lunar meteorite, which Mesick purchased at a public auction.

‘Client rings are always stressful, but the fact that this was the Apollo 11 space capstone that won the auction, a super valuable material that will never exist again, makes this ring so special,’ Bosworth said.

Background

The Apollo 11 spacecraft consisted of a command module called Columbia and a lunar module called Eagle. The Columbia spacecraft was covered with an aluminium laminate. The outside of the tape was silver to reflect the sun’s rays. Underneath that layer was gold, which deflected radiation. Both layers helped regulate temperature during the trip to the moon and back.

When Columbia returned to Earth, the intense heat caused part of the ribbon to burn. When the craft fell into the ocean, some of the coating peeled off and became an easy target for crew members who wanted to keep a souvenir of their adventure.