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Spacelab was designed by the European Space Agency to fit in the US space shuttle payload bay and allow extended experiments to be conducted by astronauts in orbit. It is a 10 ton reusable space station that flew on 22 Shuttle missions from 1983 to 1998 with astronauts like Owen Garriott and Cady Coleman.

This is an original CIMSA computer for the Spacelab Command and Data Management System (CDMS). This is a high-reliability core-memory computer built by MATRA in France. The CDMS performed processing, transmission, and data acquisition from onboard experiments.

Spacelab cried three identical MATRA 125/MS computers have a main memory capacity of 64K 16-bit words (or 128MB, the same as the first Macintosh in 1984). They were removed to upgrade to IBM AP-101SL orbiter computers. The operating system and program load comes from a main memory tape drive. The heatsink / chassis was manufactured from a single billet of aerospace aluminum and nickel plated for durability and corrosion resistance. 11.25″ x 7.75″ x 21″

NASA Summary: “Spacelab consisted of an enclosed, pressurized laboratory module and open, U-shaped pallets that could be placed behind the module or flown alone. Equipment — including telescopes, antennas and sensors — was mounted on the pallets for direct exposure to space.

In the 17 years of Spacelab, with 36 missions flown and about 800 investigations completed, this program taught scientists how to operate experiments in the microgravity environment of low-Earth orbit.

An artifact in the Future Ventures’ 🚀 Space Collection.

2 responses to “Original Computer from Spacelab, the first European Space Station”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Cutaway diagram of Spacelab inside Shuttle, filling the payload bay:Spacelab-1 flying on STS-9, looking back into the Payload bay from the upper flight deck: Interior: ID Tag: Used for a total of 741 hours (30 days) and STS-9 was a 10 day Spacelab mission I popped off the back panel to look inside: Circuit board: Software stack:

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  2. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    STS-73 Mission Specialist Cady’ Coleman works with the Generic Commercial Bioprocessing Apparatus (CGBA) experiment in the Spacelab science module:I first met her when she performed live with Chris Hadfield in space Interview with NASA: "In 1995, NASA astronaut and mission specialist Cady Coleman flew on the STS-73 Spacelab mission called the U.S. Microgravity Laboratory (USML-1), which focused on materials science, biotechnology, combustion science, fluid physics, and numerous scientific experiments housed in the Spacelab module.

    “STS-73 was really a practice session for the station,” Coleman said. “I felt like I was part of the big steps toward space station science. We did investigations back then that have led to hugely successful studies today, including the Capillary Flow Experiment (CFE). We did the very first iteration of that study on Spacelab, and we figured out what was practical and what was not. What we had were containers of liquid in a Ziploc bag attached in the Spacelab so they wouldn’t get bumped. We took pictures everyday of what form the liquid decided to take and we began to understand all the possible geometric solutions and what shapes liquids really tended to form. Now, the crew performs a similar, more sophisticated experiment almost everyday on station. CFE will help in the design of fluid transport systems on future spacecraft. It will give us an understanding how to have all the fuel in one place rather than spread over every surface in the tank, which is a problem when spacecraft operate in a microgravity environment.”

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