Female Astronauts" Memorabilia for Sale at Auctions Nearly 10 percent of the 47 American women who have flown in space have died in the process, including four of the crew members on doomed space shuttles. Artifacts from female astronauts, dead and living, bring fairly high prices at auction because of their rarity. "Unfortunately we have a fixation as well on tragedy," said Howard C. Weinberger, the senior space consultant for Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Women's memorabilia is turning up in space exploration auctions in the next few weeks. A preview opens April 21 at Bonhams in New York for an April 26 sale with a 1990s Russian training suit ($30,000 to $50,000) that the American astronaut Shannon Lucid wore while preparing for six months of orbiting the Earth in the Mir. The outfit was meant for emergencies, in case of swift depressurization, and is easily donned through a lace-up opening at ribcage level. Tubes and gauges protrude from the sleeves and torso. If it had inflated to protect Ms. Lucid, cables at the shoulders and armpits would have kept her arms from flying up. Like all vintage spacesuits it needs conservation. "The rubber inside is kind of beginning to stick to itself," Matthew Haley, a Bonhams books and manuscripts specialist, said. The spacesuit came on the market soon after Ms. Lucid's journey; the Russians have sold much of their cosmonaut collections. Bonhams is not naming the current consigners, but they have apparently left a very identifiable trail. Kaller Historical Documents in Marlboro, N.J., has lent the suit for displays at numerous institutions, including the Space Center Houston and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Texas. Signatures from female space travelers are far more common at auctions than their clothing. Inscribed photos and lithograph portraits of Sally Ride and the Challenger's Christa McAuliffe and Judith A. Resnik are estimated at up to $7,000 each at Heritage's sale, on May 12, and Regency-Superior's auction, on June 8 in St. Louis. In recent years entire archives of related material have emerged for sale. In 2009 a hundred telegrams sent to McAuliffe just before her death and posthumous condolence cards from celebrities brought $2,500 at Scott J. Winslow Associates in Bedford, N.H. "Don't go there, don't even think of going," the historian Geoffrey K. Fleming warned his colleague Ruth Ann Bramson, referring to the formerly idyllic spot in Queens Village where her great-grandfather, the artist Charles Henry Miller, spent six decades painting meadows and coves. A storage lot for beat-up cars now occupies the estate that Miller called Queenslawn. Mr. Fleming shuddered at the memory of the landscape destruction there during a recent visit to Ms. Bramson's remote waterfront home, at the end of a dirt road on the eastern tip of Long Island. She owns dozens of her forebear's works, and Mr. Fleming, the director of the Southold Historical Society on Long Island, owns 15 more. They have collaborated to spend two years and about $30,000 producing the first major book on the topic, "Charles Henry Miller, N.A.: Painter of Long Island" (Southold Historical Society/Hudson Hills Press). N.A. refers to membership in the National Academy of Design. Ms. Bramson and her husband, Dr. Robert Bramson, a physician, have lined their walls with Miller's paintings and etchings of a lost pastoral Long Island. They store their place mats and napkin rings in Miller's honey-colored art-supplies dresser, they sit in his swivel studio chair and wicker rocker, and they eat at his dining table with scrollwork feet. More art and furniture from Queenslawn are tucked into closet and attic storage spaces. "Nothing really gets treated as a shrine," Ms. Bramson said. She visited Queenslawn as a child; she remembers when antiques dealers emptied it in the 1950s just before it was razed, and many sketchbooks and paintings were scattered. "They're far and wide," she said. She also remembers her family's descriptions of Miller, who died in 1922, as industrious and cheerful, with formal manners and a knack for squandering inheritances. Miller's parents, stern descendants of 17th-century Dutch settlers in New York, wanted their son to be a doctor or lawyer. He did train as a homeopath in the 1860s and briefly served as a ship's doctor, but he mostly spent his time on deck sketching harbors and exhausted crewmen. He soon absconded to Europe, training there with mentors from the Barbizon school. His realistic style never evolved much, even as the New York scenery that he favored began to dissolve before his eyes. From the Bronx to Montauk he sketched and painted doomed country stores, gristmills, barns, shipyards and churches. He mourned the losses in his diaries. As he watched a Queens waterworks under construction, he described the builders as "destructionists and tree murderers." He predicted they would "gobble the fresh sweet water but they could not bottle this fresh sea breeze." Modern technology did occasionally interest him, however. When his cars broke down, he drew the scenery, and gave the sketches wry titles like "Waiting for a Tire Gone Flat" and "A Blowout - On the Road to Cutchogue, L.I." Miller lived off his parents" real-estate fortune while indulging his passions. His mother did not want him to sell paintings; when he did try, "it is believed that she purchased them back," Mr. Fleming and Ms. Bramson write in the book. A few years after his mother's death in 1895 he married Elizabeth Mosback, a jewelry heiress. The Bramsons own the family's largest surviving cluster of Miller works; another group was destroyed in a fire at a relative's barn two decades ago. His larger canvases, including views of Niagara Falls and Newtown Creek, seem to have vanished. Ms. Bramson, president of the board of the Oysterponds Historical Society in Orient, N.Y., said she had been meaning for decades to research Miller more fully rather than just keep the paintings under a bed. To coincide with the book's release, she and Mr. Fleming lent 25 pieces to a show that closed in February at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead, N.Y. They are both planning to donate their Miller sketchbooks to the Southold Historical Society and have not yet decided the fate of the rest of their collections. "They don't need to be under another generation's bed," Ms. Bramson said.