DSKY

I’ve had the honor and priviledge of attending five NASA Socials, and in doing so I’ve gotten to see and touch and hold some pretty neat things. But flipping through old photos tonight, I think this one has to be at the top of the list.

This is a space-flown DSKY, I believe from Apollo 16. (Might be Apollo 15, it’s been a few years, but I think it’s 16.) It’s the “display and keyboard” that was in the Apollo Command Module for the spacecraft guidance computer.

Not a backup or a test item. This hunk of metal and circuitry flew to the Moon and back fifty-ish years ago. And they let us touch it and push buttons and so on. For a “space cadet” from age 5 like me, that’s pretty freaking neat.

This was at my first NASA Social, at Edwards AFB in November, 2014. (For more pictures and about five long posts with much more detailed descriptions of everything else we saw then, search “NASA Social” on this site.) They had this there because it was later used in some of their early work with fly-by-wire control systems on fighter jets.

Space-flown hardware is THE BEST!