Apollo Cobra Head

A bunch of cool space artifacts arrived this week. (prompting office layout change =)

This sculpted beauty is a communications control assembly that connects to the exterior of the astronaut’s spacesuit for routing communications, biomedical signals, and warning tones. This piece is the control head, referred to as the ‘Cobra Head’ by the astronauts which plugs into the cabin connector near the blue control switch. It was worn by the astronaut while in the shirt-sleeve environment (example photos below).

The beta cloth covered piece measures 11” long with a toggle switch that allowed the astronaut to transmit to crewmates over the intercom (I’COM) or back the earth (XMIT). A sewn-on patch in the center bears identification stamp V36-715100-81 06362 and the serial number AAH9308.

8 responses to “Apollo Cobra Head”

jurvetson

Sep 30, 2011 at 3:22 pm

This Apollo 17 photo of Gene Cernan (left) and Ron Evans shows what it looks like in space:

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solerena

Sep 30, 2011 at 5:52 pm

sweet upsidedown zero gravity smile:) interesting about cobra head – way to communicate and looks like some chest pump, almost like this communication runs through ones blood stream and we can hear the heart beat:)

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msamaclean ©

Sep 30, 2011 at 9:13 pm

Soon your collection will need it’s own building!
Do flickr contacts get free admission to the future ‘Jurvetson Space Artifact Museum & Rocketry Center’…;-P

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Pieces of Eye

Oct 1, 2011 at 4:29 am

If I was you I would totally wait till after hours and play spaceman in my office.

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Leorex

Oct 1, 2011 at 3:49 pm

Hey Steve, did you get any Space Shuttle freebies?

As for the space shuttle main engines, those are now free. NASA advertised them in December 2008 for $400,000 to $800,000 each, but no one expressed interest. So now the engines are available, along with other shuttle artifacts, for the cost of transportation and handling.

– http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/science/space/17nasa.html

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jurvetson

Jan 9, 2012 at 6:06 pm

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeany7] – Push to Talk…. Now Push to Start… Love it

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/leorex] – I’m not a big shuttle fan… =)

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/physicsman] – why wait? Play all day

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/myfun] – Yes, all on display at the office. The big stuff is in the lobby.

P.S. Some folks were interested in this posting, and sent some cool tidbits. As seen in the movie Apollo 13:

Also, they write that "the XMIT button on your Apollo Cobra Head could become a morse code key in an emergency by flipping a switch on Panel C" in the Command Module Instrument Panel.

"Panel C, upper row of switches, 5th switch from the left. S-Band Normal:Mode:PCM/KEY
If you toggle that switch to KEY, then XMIT becomes a CW key." (at Z – 106 on this diagram)

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jurvetson

Oct 5, 2013 at 11:39 pm

Some diagrams from Space1

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jurvetson

Jul 9, 2022 at 1:41 pm

A new detail: “If astronauts lost voice communication, they could use the "emergency key" system to send Morse code which hopefully would get through. They would use the XMIT button on their umbilical cable. The voice decoder module mixed in the emergency key signal.” — Ken Shirriff’s awesome write up: twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1545467564901289984

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Apollo Cobra Head

8 responses to “Apollo Cobra Head”

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