Stumbled on these and was fascinated. It’s easy to lose sight of the world that gave us the moon landing. These are pretty nerdy, but fascinating, both for the equipment and the open discussion of invention and fabrication details, to say nothing of these tied, suited nerds running around. These are also before Apollo 1. Watch how the electronic components are assembled. I never knew how complicated those heat shields were. Scary in the ways that they accurately predicted how details would work, yet there’s a still amateurish element to some of what they show. FOOD! Over all, I’m even more amazed we made it to the moon. They are hand wiring magnetic cores, each core ‘donut’ of which is easily visible with the naked eye. There are others. If, like me, you eat this stuff up, enjoy. If not, that’s okay too. Just remember, these are some of the guys for whom all those early 60’s 321 Speedmasters were made.
I'm not sure that I still have it because I may have thrown it away a few years ago (it was in pretty rough shape), but when I was a kid, one of those guys (Mark Kanal) gave me a commemorative B&W photo of the LM with his name superimposed on it issued to him (along with a few other Grumman engineers) by NASA for his engineering work on the LM leg pods at that Bethpage, LI facility. He was a contemporary of my dad's and a neighbor in the building where I grew up. He and my dad served on the building Board together and were close friends because of their similar technical background (nuclear physics professor, in my dad's case) and (more so) because they were both German Jews who survived the Holocaust, much more narrowly in Mr. Kanal's case than my dad's. My dad and his family got out before the war as soon as my dad graduated high school in Frankfurt; Mr Kanal was about 10 years younger and was the only member of his family to survive Auschwitz (for 4 or 5 years as a child). A few years before his wife's death, the NY Times interviewed them here for an article about their life story. I moved back here about 7 years before my dad died and for the last 10 years, I've been the VP on the same Board. We have some much newer chairs, but I always purposely sit in one of the 3 remaining original ones that I know they used 40+ years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/03/nyregion/20080309_JEWS_SLIDESHOW_index.html