Bowl of the Night(two) Signed by Robert W. Farquhar: Collector Guide, Rarity & Value
This is a hand-signed copy of Bowl of the Night(two), bearing the authenticated signature of Robert W. Farquhar — the NASA mission designer who invented the concept of halo orbits and fundamentally changed how humanity navigates space. The item is in excellent condition and carries authentication traceable through Gauntlet Gallery's provenance chain. For serious collectors of NASA memorabilia and space-history signatures, a Farquhar-signed piece occupies a category that is historically undervalued relative to the signer's actual significance: a genuine pioneer whose name remains largely unknown outside aerospace circles, yet whose trajectory mathematics made missions like the first comet flyby and the first asteroid landing possible. That gap between obscurity and importance is exactly where collector value accumulates over time.
About Robert W. Farquhar
Robert W. Farquhar (1932–2015) spent his career at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center doing work that most people never heard of and that every deep-space mission since has relied upon. His defining contribution was the invention of halo orbits — a class of three-dimensional trajectories that exploits the gravitational interplay between two large bodies (such as the Earth and the Moon) to place a spacecraft at a gravitationally balanced point with minimal propellant expenditure. Before Farquhar's work, mission designers treated gravity as something to fight. Farquhar showed it could be choreographed.
The practical results were transformative. He designed the trajectory for ISEE-3/ICE, the spacecraft that in 1985 became the first in history to fly through the tail of a comet — Comet Giacobini-Zinner — after Farquhar repurposed it from its original Earth-Sun Lagrange-point mission using a sequence of five lunar flybys nobody had attempted before. He led the orbital design for NEAR Shoemaker, which in 2001 became the first spacecraft to orbit and then land on an asteroid (433 Eros). He also contributed to CONTOUR, a multi-comet mission that experienced a catastrophic failure during its 2002 Earth-departure burn — the kind of loss that underscores how difficult and how consequential this work is. Farquhar's signature does not represent celebrity. It represents the specific intellectual achievement of a man who redesigned humanity's relationship with the solar system.
About This Specific Item
Bowl of the Night is a short story that follows a young girl named Lily as she encounters a magical bowl at a haunted house — a vessel that grants her deepest desires across a series of fantastical scenarios. The narrative arc moves through wish-fulfillment toward a resolution centered on self-acceptance and the limits of external gratification. Bowl of the Night(two) is the second work in this series, extending the central metaphor of the bowl as a mirror for inner longing. The title's astronomical resonance — the night sky as a bowl containing all possibility — creates a natural connection to space exploration and to the figures who spent their lives interpreting what lies within that bowl.
That Farquhar signed this particular work adds a layer of meaning that goes beyond typical space memorabilia. His career was defined by understanding what is reachable — plotting courses to comets, asteroids, and Lagrange points that most engineers dismissed as inaccessible. A signature from someone who spent decades calculating the paths between Earth and the objects overhead, placed on a story about a child looking up and reaching for what she wants most, is a collector pairing with genuine thematic coherence. The item is in excellent condition, with the signature clear and placement consistent with authenticated Farquhar exemplars.
Rarity and Scarcity
The supply of authenticated Robert Farquhar signatures is permanently closed. He passed in 2015, and unlike the Apollo-era astronauts who participated in organized signing events for decades, Farquhar never occupied the mainstream celebrity tier that drives high-volume autograph supply. The authenticated inventory that exists today is the entire inventory that will ever exist. There is no pipeline.
Contrast this with the Neil Armstrong market for reference: Armstrong stopped signing in 1994, passed in 2012, and left an estimated 55,000 authenticated items in circulation — a number large enough to sustain an active secondary market with published price benchmarks. Buzz Aldrin remains an active signer as of 2025, with PSA- and JSA-graded material entering the market regularly. Farquhar occupies neither category. His collector market is niche, his total authenticated supply is small, and his historical significance is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves as space history scholarship deepens. Items in excellent condition with clean provenance — the combination this piece offers — are the ones that anchor value as the market matures.
Authentication and What to Look For
Every signed item in Gauntlet Gallery's inventory goes through third-party grading by PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) or JSA (James Spence Authentication) before it enters the catalog. Both organizations maintain reference databases of known exemplars for aerospace and scientific signers, and their graders perform letter-by-letter comparison before issuing a certificate. A graded certificate includes: the authenticator's unique hologram serial number (cross-referenceable on their public verification portals), a description of the signed item, the assigned grade (PSA uses a 1–10 scale; JSA uses letter grades from Authentic through F), and the grader's identity code.
For Robert Farquhar specifically, key signature characteristics include a confident, compressed cursive with a pronounced capital R and a characteristically looping h in "Farquhar" — details that trained graders use to distinguish genuine exemplars from forgeries. Because Farquhar was not a high-volume signer, forgeries are uncommon (the market was never large enough to incentivize them), but the PSA/JSA certification provides the secondary-market documentation that serious collectors require when buying, selling, or insuring a piece. Gauntlet Gallery provides the original graded certificate, full provenance notes, and a satisfaction guarantee with every purchase.
Value Context
Robert Farquhar's autograph market sits in the historically undervalued segment of NASA signatures — which, from a collector's standpoint, represents opportunity. Comparable authenticated NASA mission-designer and flight-director signatures have traded between $150 and $600 depending on item type, condition tier, and grading. Farquhar's name does not yet carry the premium of an Apollo crew member, but the fundamentals that drive long-term value are present: permanent supply closure (2015), documented historical significance, and a growing community of space-history collectors who prioritize mission architects over mission celebrities.
Gauntlet Gallery's comparable-sales database — built from 160,000+ transactions across Heritage Auctions, RR Auction, Bonhams Space History sales, and private dealer records — shows that condition is the single largest variable in realized price for niche signers. An excellent-condition piece with clean provenance and PSA/JSA certification consistently outperforms ungraded or lower-condition equivalents by 40–80% at auction. This item's excellent condition rating and full authentication documentation position it at the upper end of the Farquhar market. Contact the gallery for current pricing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Browse authenticated space memorabilia at Gauntlet Gallery. Every item ships with PSA or JSA certification, full provenance documentation, and a satisfaction guarantee. Contact the gallery directly for pricing and availability on Robert Farquhar signed pieces.
