Steve Jurvetson's personal collection of Apollo Lunar Module parts | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jurvetson's personal collection of Apollo Lunar Module parts

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137 pointsgessha30 comments

CuriousMarc has been repairing some of Steve Jurvetson's pieces on YouTube. Fascinating work.

I hope that this collection finds its way to the public museums in the future where it can be maintained in perpetuity. The current curator seems to care deeply about it and it would be amazing if that continues for future generations.

> I hope that this collection finds its way to the public museums in the future where it can be maintained in perpetuity.

Public museums are not bad per se, but they have a lot of disadvantages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO6F9CfgMg4

My summary of the argument:

* Modern museums tend to cater to the general public, which means interesting and unique pieces that are of primary importance to experts in the field are often not on display.

* Private collectors are often better at making their collections available in meaningful ways.

* The bulk of a museum's collection tends not to be displayed at any one time.

Of course, it's a risk if he were to transfer his collection to another private individual - a museum is the safer option. But I don't think the decision clear cut either.

>Private collectors are often better at making their collections available in meaningful ways.

Citation very much needed. The vast majority of items in private collections, including the entirety of the vast majority of private collections, are unknown, uncatalogued, and utterly unavailable.

yeah, this reeks of confirmation bias. It's cool that Steve Jurvetson lets CuriousMarc play with his collection to this extent, and what we got out of it has been amazing, but I don't assume this to be the general case.

Counterexample: The AGC they restored was sold and then never heard from again. Of course it must be said that they had the opportunity to restore it to begin with because it was privately owned. Although if you're into vintage computing, you'll see there's also museums who loan out pieces to youtubers to restore/make videos about.

Museums have been dumbed down. The Henry Ford museum near Detroit was once aimed at people like Henry Ford, who liked the engineering. Glass cases with "Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, 1944". That sort of thing. I once spent about fifteen minutes figuring out a piece of machinery which turned out to be a combination camera/kinescope scanner for rotating disk television. It was labeled something like "Scanner, Baird system, ca. 1935". That was dumbed down some time in the 1980s.

The Smithsonian's Museum of History and Technology had some original ENIAC panels, powered up! You could push buttons and make them count. They had a huge collection of clock escapements, which they kept wound. An Atlas Guidance Computer with someone who operated it once an hour. The original Perceptron. Now it's the Museum of American History, and much simplified.

Private collectors can be great, but the risk of collections in private hands being dissolved on death is substantial. I say this as a Seattle native who's been saddened by what happened to Paul Allen's various collections after his passing.

It's a good example, but it's entirely Paul's fault. A trust is not exactly rocket science or esoteric, and if Paul actually cared about any of these things he had many years to just ask lawyers to set something up with a few million in reserves for each of the Living Computer Museum, Cinerama, SciFi Museum, etc. (and many months after his final diagnosis to tell some lawyer to go do so).

The fact that he did not shows that he just wanted tax breaks for his toys and is a great example of why private collections aren't great.

Yeah sorry I don’t buy it. I’m absolutely certain if the JPL got funding to build a museum, it would be exactly like this only way better.

Instead, we make sure we have billionaires.

JPL has a museum.

https://informal.jpl.nasa.gov/museum/content/jet-propulsion-...

Look what's happened with the Paul Allen collection with the Living Computer Museum.

Here is a two-part tour of the collection via Scott Manley's YT.[0] There is more than just Apollo stuff. According to the first video, the most expensive acquisition was a shovel which was used to dig/scoop on the moon.

There is also a request for information about an old Soviet data storage device which neither Steve nor Scott knew anything about.[1] If anyone has any ideas, I'm sure they would appreciate a comment or email.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjoSCPIjVwg

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6Fn5iWSHQ

[1] https://youtu.be/MK6Fn5iWSHQ?t=1068

I like how excited Steve is explaining this stuff

kid in a candy store

Lots of this stuff has ended up at CuriousMarc's lab, for restoration and archiving. I strongly recommend his YouTube channel if you're into electronics tinkering and/or Apollo.

Thanks for the recommendation! This is a fascinating channel indeed.

I’ve been lucky enough to see in person many of these pieces when they were exhibited in DFJ’s offices in Sand Hill Road (~2017-2018). It’s an extraordinary collection.

The tour is amazing: https://youtu.be/4FOF0f70Hoc

Back in the Sixties the Russians already had two secret space stations in orbit with working machine guns: https://youtu.be/4FOF0f70Hoc?t=408

I don't know much about Jurvetson (apart from him being a VC) but his passion, enthusiasm, and deep knowledge of each of these items in the video is infectious.

Very cool stuff.

I've seen these personally, I have a bunch of pictures too. Thanks to my friend Jack!

I think the coolest things were:

A piece of the Hindenburg The lunar module computer The big rocket engine with the hand welded cooling tube making up the rocket nozzle. Truly amazing to see the workmanship up close.

FV was our seed-round VC, and I snagged a set of photos if anyone wants more -- though they're not nearly as good as Steve's photos in the link above!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/uPBt1z3UnLxoSx9P7

But I really liked the spacex honeycomb lander leg that I didn't see in the flickr set.

It's a truly amazing collection.

I'm not a jealous person. I dont want his money.

But his collection of space things? Oh, I'm green with envy!

I wish the captions would just stay on instead of fading in and out.

"Andy Weir, author of The Martian, holds a Mars rock for the first time"

um...

It’s part of a meteorite.

Crazy that you can sexually harass women and buy up one of the world's amazing collections of space exploration artifacts. Karma is such a laughable concept

Don’t forget shilling for Theranos: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-19/early-the...

Being deceived doesn't make you a bad person. Theranos deceived a lot of people. That's kind of the point.

I don't think this is a great place to re-litigate this, but I believe DFJ's investigation found a pattern of affairs, but not harassment.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/11/18/steve-jurvets...

Which, eh, in my mind, harassment deserves heavy consequences but that also necessitates being careful to differentiate.

> While there were allegations of inappropriate behavior, DFJ did not receive an official complaint of harassment or misconduct.[28][29] While the findings of the investigation were not made public, anonymous sources alleged that the investigation "uncovered behaviors by Jurvetson that were unacceptable related to a negative tone toward women entrepreneurs.

So anyway, what do you think should happen to him? All his possessions seized? Life in prison?

The only misconduct _alleged_ is that he had extramarital affairs and led women on:

"Those sources said DFJ’s external investigators at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett discovered from at least two women — who confirmed their accounts to Recode — that Jurvetson had allegedly carried out affairs with multiple women simultaneously. Some of the women also said they felt led on by the married man and were unaware of the other relationships." https://www.vox.com/2017/11/18/16647078/steve-jurvetson-dfj-...

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