Pictured here, one eighth of the RGB LEDs and an emulator used in the DomeStar project, featured at this weekend’s Interactive Show.

Tickets are just $20, and your bar tab is on us! Proceeds help keep NYC Resistor going strong.

The camera was a Sony DSLR with a timelapse-controller.com trigger and a large battery pack.

To ensure that it didn’t move during the next twenty four hours, we bolted it to the ground with the help of United Space Alliance workers and a large hammer drill..

Starting at 22:00 they rolled the SCA 747 from the hangar to the ramp.

Since it wasn’t under slung load yet, we were able to get close enough to read the gauges on the 747. You can see the quad engine readout for the flight engineer.

The teams from United Space Alliance and NASA attached the mobile Mate-Demate Device sling to the attachment points on the orbiter.

Extra wide panorama of OV101, the SCA and the MDD.

The sling has a Hydra-Set load moving attachment that was read by a team member with a spotting scope. It uses hydrostatic pressure to adjust the height of the sling in 0.025 mm, allowing the team to install or remove bolts without having to use the coarse adjustments of the cranes.

NASA operates under a waiver from OSHA to let the crew work on the Orbiter even when it is a slung load. These team members are removing the last bolts from the rear ball and socket joints (called “the salad bowl”) in preparation for the hoist.

Finally free from the SCA — the forward a-frame is no longer connected.

A real-time video of the push back. Everything is done very slowly and under precise control.

There was quite a bit of water in the aerodynamic tail cone from its exposed position over the past two weeks. It poured out once the shuttle was free from the SCA.

A custom flat bed low-boy trailer was brought in and the Enterprise lowered onto it. This took longer than expected since the orbiter rides on the SCA with a fairly high angle of attack, but the trailer was built to hold it level. This cause the aft bolts to not line up and required a few hours of on-site engineering to stack lumber under the front attachment point to restore the correct angle. So, yes, the Space Shuttle Enterprise is now up on blocks.

At sunrise the Enterprise was finally pushed back into Hangar 12 and we were able to pack up our gear to go home.

The SCA has one more flight to deliver Endeavour, and then it will be decommissioned.

It has flown quite a few ferry flights during its thirty year history.

The time lapse video of the entire demate and towing operation compresses the twenty hours into one minute. This was shown on NASA TV and provided TV stations, and the Smithsonian will be mixing it into an exhibit as part of the Last Shuttle Project.

More Enterprise photos from Bill Ward

More Enterprise photos from Guy Dickinson

More Enterprise photos from Trammell Hudson

Me oh my, it sure is nice out. Better get inside and do some learning! Come on down to NYCR for CLASSES!

Intro to JavaScript on May 12: Dominate the web with one of the web’s dominant languages. Javascript!!!

Introduction to Electronics on May 26: Harness the endless power of the ELECTRON! Really, how can you resist this.

Paper Engineering on May 26: Go beyond simple popup designs and learn secret techniques from the professionals. Also, crazy fun.

This weekend a bunch of NYCR members went to the Vintage Computer Festival East (8.0), held at the InfoAge / MARCH computer history museum in Wall, NJ. Read on for more photos from the musuem.


Daniel Kottke, Apple employee #12, gave a keynote about the history of developing the early Apples in Job’s garage through the initial Mac design.

One of the highlights was a functional wire-wrapped DEC PDP-11.

Connected to it was the original terminal, the VT05, as well as VT-102 and VT-220 terminals.

Homebrew computers were in abundance. Here are some hackers hacking away on an unknown system, surrounded by a TI Silent 700, a SWTP 6800 and a PERCOM floppy drive.

There were Apple II’s and many clones were on exhibit at the show.

Inside the MARCH exhibits at the museum were such notables as an original Apple 1. Note the lock on the custom case — a working model recently sold at auction for $213k, so they don’t want this one to go missing!

Frank O’Brien has an exhibit on the Apollo Guidance Computer to go along with his excellent book.

In the punch-card era room is a Univac 1540 tape drive, with dual tape decks. It was also considered a “mobile computer”, in that it could fit inside a trailer or submarine.

And in the warehouse are such treasures as an Amdahl 4705, but the museum lacks the funds to restore and exhibit them. You can donate to MARCH on their website to help bring some of this historical artifacts back to life.

There are some more photos of the museum and exhibits from our trip. You might also enjoy these photos of our restoration of an IBM 129 data data recorder — MARCH provided NOS ribbons so that we can read the printouts.

And finally, one of our purchases at the consignment booth at the show claims “No user servicable parts”. We’ll see about that in a later post…

They didn’t get any action shots of the teensy . Nice Arduino though.

Come build and program an Arduino with expert guidance. You’ll build your own Freeduino kit and program it. Even if you’ve never soldered anything in your life, you’ll come away with a working micro controller that you built.

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