Computer Museum of America Pre-Launch Celebration

The Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia, had a pre-launch celebration for donors and guests on July17, 2019. I was invited as the guest of S&T Geotronics, who had donated replicas of the Open DSKY and the Enigma to the museum. Since the public grand opening of the museum was scheduled for July 20, 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, the theme was of course Apollo-related. In addition to computers ranging from older punch-card-reading types to Cray 3 supercomputers, the museum had a central exhibit celebrating America’s early space race. They had a number of genuine and replica artifacts, some beautiful scale models, and a very interesting timeline of the race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

At the center of this exhibit was an extremely high-fidelity replica of the Apollo Lunar Module. Having been studying the Apollo spacecraft in excruciating detail over the past few months, I really appreciated seeing this. I had expected a miniature or a cheap replica, but this appeared accurate and detailed enough to perhaps have been a training replica, although I don’t know whether or not it really was.