Owen Garriott Signed NASA Portrait — Skylab 3 Science Pilot, With House COA

The summer of 1973, Owen K. Garriott had been living in orbit for nearly two months. He was up there fixing a crippled station nobody was sure would survive, running solar experiments, conducting spacewalks, and — on August 4th — pulling off one of the great practical jokes in the history of space exploration: he had his wife record her voice before launch, then played the tape over the radio to Mission Control, letting Houston spend several very confused minutes trying to figure out why a woman was answering from Skylab. A scientist. A prankster. A man who spent 59 days, 11 hours in orbit and then came back eleven years later on STS-9 to do it again. That is who signed this photograph.

This is an official NASA color press portrait — Garriott in the white A7LB pressure suit, name tag "O. GARRIOTT" at the chest, the standard cloud-drape studio backdrop behind him — signed in bold blue ink across the lower border: "Best wishes — Owen Garriott." The format is the classic NASA red-number press lithograph distributed for decades through the astronaut office, signed by Garriott at public appearances and through correspondence. Garriott was among the more generous signers in the corps; clean signed examples circulate, but a fully legible, unsmeared signature on a bright, undamaged portrait is the version worth owning. This is that version. Mesilla Valley Estate Sales issues a Certificate of Authenticity with this lot.

Owen Kay Garriott (1930–2023) was part of NASA's second group of scientist-astronauts, selected in 1965 — the cohort meant to prove that space wasn't just for test pilots, but for researchers. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer and ionospheric physicist, Garriott brought genuine scientific purpose to every mission he flew. As science pilot on Skylab 3 (July–September 1973), he helped rescue a station that had launched with its meteoroid/thermal shield torn away, spending weeks nursing it back to operational health while logging 1,081 hours of scientific observations. A decade later, he flew STS-9 / Spacelab 1 (1983) — the first flight of ESA's Spacelab module — logging another ten days and running over 70 experiments. In 2008, his son Richard became the first second-generation American astronaut, a lineage that gives the Garriott name a particular resonance in space history.

Garriott occupies a specific and underappreciated lane in astronaut collecting: a scientist-astronaut rather than a test pilot, a genuine researcher whose contributions to long-duration spaceflight laid the groundwork for everything that followed — ISS, commercial station concepts, the whole arc of humans living and working in space. Signed material from the Skylab era carries added weight because it represents NASA's pivot from lunar glory to orbital science, a chapter that rarely gets the reverence it deserves. The included Mesilla Valley Estate Sales COA provides a documented chain of custody from this house.

CONDITION

Very Good. The signature is bold and fully legible in blue ink. A horizontal handling crease runs across the upper third of the sheet, with light surface soiling to the border margins. Presented in a protective sleeve.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• 10" × 8"
• Medium: NASA color lithograph (press portrait)
• Inscription: "Best wishes — Owen Garriott" (blue ink, lower border)
• Authentication: Mesilla Valley Estate Sales Certificate of Authenticity included