Identifying Autopens
The bane of the autograph collecting world, forgeries inevitably become more prevelent as genuine signatures become more valuable. As the money involved increases the quality of forgeries also tends to increase making it more and more difficult to spot the fakes. The world of space autographs is already plagued by Armstrong forgeries and fake Apollo 11 crew signed items and the problem is only likely to get worse.
I won't go into much detail here as these pages are dedicated to spotting autopens, not forgeries. The key thing is to be wary of any items that seem to be too good to be true, and if possible to seek advice from experts on forums like those on CollectSpace before rushing into any expensive purchase.
One thing that is worth mentioning in this context is that, for the moment at least, personalised signed items tend to fetch much less money on the space autograph market than unpersonalised signatures. Combined with the fact that faking significant amounts of handwriting is more difficult, more time consuming, and more risky than simply faking a signature, this tends to mean that space autograph forgers rarely create 'personalised' items. It logically follows that personalised items are less likely to be forged than simple signed items, although caution is still advised.