He then remembered a felt-tip pen he had carried inside his personal preference kit, which was not officially on the flight manifest but remained in his suit pocket.
He carefully positioned the plastic casing of the pen to engage the broken mechanism. "I gingerly pressed the pen against the engine arm circuit breaker.
For a long moment, I didn't want to remove the tip from the circuit breaker, hoping against hope that it would hold," Aldrin recounted.
The improvised repair worked. "The pen did the trick; the circuit breaker held.
We could return to Earth after all!" Aldrin declared.
The historic items have remained in Aldrin's possession for over five decades.
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"I still have that broken circuit breaker from Apollo 11 and the felt-tip pen that helped get us off the moon," he stated.
