In my previous Spacefest article, I highlighted the experience of meeting people and interacting with historical artifacts. One of the more special of these artifacts present at Spacefest IX was space collector Jimmie Loocke’s Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). The AGC is the computer that navigated Apollo spacecraft to and from the Moon, including the Lunar Module’s landing and ascent from the surface. Each craft in the stack, the Command Module (CM) and the Lunar Module (LM), had their own computer.

During the Apollo program, Jimmie Loocke worked as a Thermal Vacuum Test Technician in Building 32 at NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center). Part of the work he and his colleagues did was to human-rate the Lunar Module in the thermal vacuum chamber, simulating the environment of outer space by piping out most of the air in the chamber and fluctuating the temperature. Lunar Test Article 8 (LTA-8), one of the very first LMs intended for testing, arrived at MSC in 1967 and began undergoing these vacuum tests. Loocke recalls the LM would stay inside the chamber for more than 160 hours, and that astronauts would be inside the vehicle for some of that time. Despite his active role in the human-rating, Loocke remembers that contractors like him had very specific jobs (such as taking readings from potentiometers) and did not have an overview of the entire project. Even still, they put in lots of overtime to get the job done: “I remember one week, I worked 100 hours,” Loocke told me in our interview. The human-rating of LTA-8, as well as the vehicle’s support of missions like Apollo 11, was a landmark development in Apollo, as it essentially helped prove the vehicle’s flight-worthiness.

Part of Jimmie Loocke’s training was to become familiar with LM systems to better understand the tests. At this point, we fast forward to 1976. Loocke was working on a new project involving speaker boxes. On a quest for electrical components, he heard about a friend's friend with a warehouse filled with hardware. Upon digging through the equipment in the warehouse, he began to recognize Apollo components. Specifically, Lunar Module components.

It turns out the man who owned the warehouse, Virgil Redgate, had acquired the surplus hardware at NASA GSA auctions in the Houston area. Redgate had intended on extracting the precious metals and then scrapping the rest. Upon seeing the Apollo components, Loocke knew he had to save them. It turns out the boxes of equipment also included a few pieces from Mercury, Gemini, and Surveyor as well. Some hardware had documentation explaining the test history of each article, which took years for Loocke to sort through and identify exactly what he had.

Long story short, Loocke was able to obtain over 2 tons (1800kg) of NASA hardware. The crown jewel is his Block II Lunar Module AGC, which, in synchronicity, came out of LTA-8, the same test vehicle he had worked on. Upon speaking with Jimmie at Spacefest, I soon realized the significance of his AGC doesn’t end there. The computer is in such good condition that after some maintenance, it could theoretically be turned on for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 next July.

In attempting to accomplish this incredible idea, Loocke describes himself as blessed to be surrounded by experts on computer engineering. Eldon Hall, lead designer of AGC hardware and early Integrated Circuit advocate at MIT, is a friend of Loocke’s, and Hall publicly disassembled the LTA-8 AGC at the MAPLD 4 conference (Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Devices) in 2004. Loocke recommends Hall’s book Journey to the Moon as the best AGC book available.