Whirlwind Tour of Steve Jurvetson's Astounding Space Collection

A few days ago, we (Carl, Ken, Mike and I) went to visit famed space investor and collector Steve Jurvetson, primarily to return his mechanical Soyuz space clock along with the little clock driver I made for it as a gift. We were treated to a brief tour of his amazing collection.

Steve was quite happy with the clock driver. Of all the alarm sounds, he preferred the Soyuz launch recording.

We also returned his Apollo LVDC core memory module that Ken had written about. Here is Ken explaining it to Steve:

Ken also returned the Titan missile guidance computer he had written about, for which he had made a front plexiglass panel so you could see the inside (otherwise it' just a big black box):

We had extracted the core memory block, made out of flex circuits, and displayed it on top. 

Unfortunately I lost the footage of the Titan computer tear down to a camera malfunction, so your best bet is to go and read his article:

http://www.righto.com/2020/03/the-core-memory-inside-saturn-v-rockets.html

We then found ourselves in a cave of wonders. Everywhere you look, there are amazing space artifacts, many of them flown, some to the Moon, from both the US and Soviet programs. It goes on and on and on, and each item would deserve a whole video on its own - some would even deserve a book.

Imagine owning a genuine MOCR console. This one was actually used in the Apollo 13 movie. It is a Shuttle era console. From the buttons, it had to do with communications and telemetry for the Spacelab module aboard the Shuttle. The electronics are still inside so there is a possibility we could power it up again.

Another outstanding piece was this RL-10 engine. As you'll see later on, a famous guest would step in and have fun figuring out the complicated plumbing.

That's looking into the liquid hydrogen regeneratively cooled engine bell. You can see the combustion chamber and its injectors in the middle, and the bell lined with cooling tubes in which the liquid hydrogen flows and gets transformed into a gas while cooling the bell.

There are also many items from the Soviet space program, including a complete, flown Soyuz control panel:

It has the same digital clock as the one we restored on the upper left, and the amazing Globus instrument on the upper right.

Here is another Globus in the collection. It is one of my favorite space instruments, with the poetic hand painted globe in the middle, and complicated geared mechanism at the back, it has an inimitable steampunk flair. 

Many significant Apollo artifacts are in the collection. Here is the forward hatch of the Apollo command module.

A piece of the command module panel:

A piece of the LM panel, with astronauts signatures and the rendez-vous radar button in "slew" position that caused the 1201 and 1202 alarms.

Two fuel cells from the Apollo command module. I briefly looked at the possibility of starting one up, but you need liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen at incredible pressures, and bring the thing up to 400CF. So it's very hard and dangerous to do. Maybe something we could do with Ben Krasnow from Applied Science?

Some original panels from the Apollo firing room, with their Roto-Tellites and Twist-Lites which I like so much:

It has exquisite loom wiring at the back.

What has 4 gimballed engines, is very large, and launched astronauts to the moon?

It's the Saturn V rocket of course, and this is the panel that monitored the gimbal angles of the four giant F1 engines on the SI-C booster first stage. The fifth engine was not gimballed. You can barely see that  it's written SI-C at the bottom.

You want to make sure your pressure and temps are all right too:

Steve also has all sorts of electronic items. It took Mike less than 10 minutes to identify and pull out the original drawings for this piece of electronics from the Apollo command module. It's a signal conditioning module for the telemetry system.

Here are two telecom modules, also from the Apollo command module. I believe these are the traveling wave power amplifiers for the USB communication at 2 GHz. Basically the radio link to earth. This is all tube based of course, as there was no solid state microwave power electronics available at the time. Steve wanted us to have a look at it, and Ken took them for a first look. I hope we can power them up in my lab - I am fairly well equipped for microwave work.

There are some really unusual items, like this Skylab exercise bike:

The panel for the bike is made from switches and gauges taken directly from the LM! Now that must be the coolest exercise bike around.

And lest I forget, the row of seats from one of the Apollo command modules is one of the center pieces of the collection.

What is incredible is that you can actually touch the stuff. I had the pleasure to try the hand controller to move the ship around. It feels satisfyingly strong and positive.

There are pieces of modern space exploration, particularly from SpaceX - hey, Steve foots the bills, so he get some choice pieces.

Some of the wreckage for SN8:

One of the panels of the DM-2 Dragon capsule, the first SpaceX mission to carry humans to space:

But who is that guy on the left? Yes, it's Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. He just showed up at the door while we were there!

He was immediately attracted to the RL-10 engine, and started to figure out how it was plumbed out. After 15 min he had identified what most parts did and how it was connected.

Tim was out of batteries for his 4k camera, but by a stroke of luck, it used the same Sony batteries as my lights, so I was able to rescue him. That was my humble contribution to his fantastic work.

There is just so much other stuff in the collection, it's hard to wrap you head around it. I have lots of disjointed footage, not sure if I can make a coherent video of it. But Steve is very keen of having us take some items, researching them and trying to make them work. We have our work cut out for us!

Marc