Steve Jurvetson's personal Apollo collection (photos)
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson engages his fascination for the Apollo program by amassing a unique collection of artifacts, including one that was on the moon. And a piece of it.
Welcome to DFJ. Have a rocket.
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has a thing for space. When he's not investing in startups like SpaceX and Tesla, he indulges this hobby. About two years ago, he began acquiring artifacts from the Apollo program.
This is a Lunar Module Descent Engine. This unit, which Jurvetson believes may be the only complete one still in existence, obviously did not go space. Those that did, stayed there.
The LMDE used hypergolic fuels: Two chemicals that combust spontaneously when mixed. On Apollo 13, the LMDE was used to push the docked Lunar Module plus Command Module back to Earth when disaster struck that mission on the way to the moon.
Behind the desk
Gimbal lock
On the Apollo 11 mission, two of the three axes ended up nearly parallel to each other, a situation known as "gimbal lock." The flight computer locked the display in a fault configuration, and the astronauts had to recalibrate the system by coordinating it with star sightings.
Not exactly user-friendly
Jurvetson believes NASA built about 75 DSKYs. He also says that during their construction, NASA absorbed "the majority" of semiconductors that were being manufactured at the time.
The flight computer
He adds: "More interesting still is the ghost in the machine. The magnetic cores within still hold whatever program they had when powered down. Since there are no tapes or archives of the code, it is possible that the only remaining copy of the Saturn V flight program is in cores like this. I have the load/write boards, and they look very wonky. If you know of any living domain expert on this system, please point them my way." (from his Flickr archive)
"Furby had more compute power," Jurvetson says. For more about the LVDC, see Spaceaholic.
Engineering, get me more power!
Geek alert: Jurvetson has annotated this panel with mouse rollovers (awesome).
Fuel cell
Don't fail me now
Jurvetson says that Neil Armstrong called this complex and electrical assembly a "hairball." It's reportedly the only piece of equipment that gave him nightmares.
We have no holodeck
Back from the moon
The COAS was a periscope-like optical device that Apollo pilots used to sight their targets on spacecraft they were docking with (Lunar Module to Command Module).
Apollo 16 commander John Young secreted this COAS back from his Lunar Module, the Orion. He held on to it for 38 years. Jurvetson bought it at an auction; it was the first major acquisition of his collection.
Before fly-by-wire
Open the hatch
Jurvetson says the final hatches were completely round, with no flat spots. He says that in early tests, NASA found that astronauts' big life-support backpacks could get hung up on the indent.
Interphone
For big thumbs
Not a standard
Nuclear Saturn V?
The command module, as re-envisioned
Lovely piping
Build log
"They had no GPS."
You can't own a piece of the moon. Or can you?
Jurvetson says it, like the Earth, is 4.6 billion years old.