It wasn’t a space craft that went down in the history of the Apollo moon missions, but it was still a unique piece of equipment that the Cosmosphere has just finished restoring. SpaceWorks – the exhibit design and spacecraft restoration division of the space museum – has just completed its latest preservation of a 12,000-pound Apollo test capsule for the Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey, Calif.

Known as “Boilerplate #19A,” the test capsule with the not-so-fancy name has a definite place in space lore.  Identical to those used on Moon missions, this capsule was dropped multiple times from a C-133 cargo plane, allowing NASA engineers to test the craft and parachute recovery systems without endangering human life.

Compared to other remaining capsules from the Apollo era, this particular artifact was exceptional, due the fact that it still contained original components. SpaceWorks stabilized the original materials, cleaned and preserved the surfaces and prepared the capsule as a full-time exhibit.”

SpaceWorks has nine new project bids pending approval by customers, totaling more than $350,000.  Chief among them is the opportunity to produce the display case for Mercury Astronaut Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 capsule, which is being relocated from the U.S. Naval Academy to the John F. Kennedy Museum in Boston.