The Apollo Education Experience Project
Building a full-scale Apollo Command Module replica
Aside from the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer), one of the key pieces of equipment in the Apollo Command Module was the Entry Monitor System, or EMS. This device had a few specialized functions, but arguably the most important was to monitor the speed and position of the CM during reentry
Because of the unusual shape of the Command Module, I needed to start off modeling the structure in 3D before ever cutting a single board. I don’t have a dedicated CAD program, so I’m doing my modeling in Blender. Hey — it’s free and it’s something I already know. This
The mission timer was the first electronic piece I designed and built for the project. The mission timer provided a continuous display of the Mission Elapsed Time, or time in seconds, minutes, and hours from liftoff. Many of the scheduled events during an Apollo mission were directly synchronized with the
Now that some of the electronic components I ordered have come in, I can get the lighting on the FDAI done. Looking at a real FDAI, there are two parts to the lighting — the rate scales and the ball itself. To light the rate scales, I decided to insert
The DSKY kits come with battery packs for power, holding 6 AA batteries for a total of 9 volts. However, I want the DSKY units in the Command Module to run off of the DC busses (“Main Bus A” or “Main Bus B”). The DC busses will be 12 volts,
The “8-ball” in my FDAI replica has one degree of freedom of movement within the PBC “yoke.” Now to give it a second. I used a hole saw to cut a circle out of a piece of MDF which was just the right size to fit in the 3-inch side
While waiting for the 1/64″ stripe dry transfer decals to arrive, I started work on the face of the FDAI. At first, this looked like it would be really hard, but after a bit of study and thinking I realized it was just a bunch of layers. So, after figuring
One of the things I knew going into this project was that I would need to make a decent replica of the Flight Director Attitude Indicator, or FDAI, commonly known to the Apollo astronauts as the “8-ball.” This was a mechanism similar to the artificial horizon of normal aircraft, but
