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Behind the Scenes At NASA's Mission Control Center
willith writes "I was recently given the opportunity to spend several hours on the floor of Historic Mission Operations Control Room #2, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. MOCR2 was used to control almost manned Gemini and Apollo mission, including Apollo 11 & 13. More, my tour guide was none other than famous Apollo mission controller Sy Liebergot, one of the fellows behind the solution that saved Apollo 13. I go in-depth on the role of the flight controller during Apollo, and focus on how and why Mission Control functioned, and I spend a lot of time talking about the consoles and how they worked. The feature includes a ton of anecdotes and stories from Mr. Liebergot about mission control in general, and about what he did during Apollo 12 & 13 specifically. I also put together a supplemental report that goes through each and every station and describes their Apollo-era layout."
He designed the P-Tube controller boards, any time we're involved with tourist he shows those boards off.
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Big daring projects like the Apollo program and Mars Curiosity, is the reason why I love NASA so much. It's one of the few Federal programs I would actually like to see expanded. They do so much with so little. I hope whoever wins this next election finds a way to expand their budget.
“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.” Carl Sagan,
Which Apollo Missions didn't happen in that room? I thought that Gemini flights were hosted somewhere else, but I could see why they'd want to practice for Apollo through the Gemini flights in that room. Definitely explains the Gemini patches on the wall. Was it retooled after Gemini? I remember hearing that NASA offered it to the Apollo 13 Movie, but that they built a set instead that was so realistic that NASA employees on an advisory role would find themselves looking for the elevator that existed at the real one on their way out. I'm glad that the control room has been well preserved.
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This is wonderful information -- I'm so glad to finally know it all. Thank you for the thorough documentation! I grew up at 1927 Richvale Lane, just a short bike ride from building 30. We were the first 25 houses there when it was all pastures, wild animals and bayous, and the Manned Spacecraft Center was brand new. My dad worked on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and then shuttle. We had dinners with the guys who worked there, as well as with the astronauts and their families. Of course, I was just a kid and thought is was all cool but no big deal. In retrospect, I can now see how magical it was. Everyone in the entire community was working together for something so optimistic and positive during a pretty lousy time otherwise, with assassinations, the war, and violent protests and riots.
But we were immune to it because everyone was 100% focused on getting a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the decade. I guess that's why I like startups so much -- it's the same focus on a single objective with everyone pulling together. We don't change the world as the 100,000 engineers did on the 60s, but it's all we have left these days.
Krantz's book, "Failure is not an Option", covers much of this material, with more information about the people at those consoles and what they did.
Those Philco-Ford console systems showed up in a number of other places, including NORAD HQ in Cheyenne Mountain and the USAF Satellite Control Center in Sunnyvale. Those screens are TV screens on a cable TV system, with a TV tuner in the console. All video generation is elsewhere. Anyone on the system could tune in anyone's screen. Military command and control centers are often set up with that capability even today. It makes coordinated teamwork possible without people having to physically hang around the console where the action is.
According to TFA, the control room featured is mostly Shuttle era equipment, with SOME Apollo era consoles and equipment.
Interesting things I learned from the article:
- Bare information from the mainframe (IBM System/360) was combined with an automated slide overlay to make it more readable with column headings and threshold levels etc.
- Each person manning a console had a small team of people in another room helping them and communicating with them.
- These people were the real deal, and were hand picked for their positions. People who couldn't deal with the weight of the position were washed out within a year before they ever made it to a live mission.
- From TFA " Sy recommends the IEEE's three-part article, "Houston, We Have a Solution" as the most complete and accurate retelling of the entire Apollo 13 explosion and its aftermath."
That is HERE: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/apollo-13-we-have-a-solution and it is a FANTASTIC read. The lessons learned from Apollo 13 were fantastic, and upgrades were applied before Apollo 14. One major one was that if something went out of spec, a light would come one advising that there was an anomaly. But, if it went away, so did the light. So an intermittent problem had to be caught red handed. By Apollo 14, they'd changed it so that the light *stayed* on until dismissed. Seems obvious now, but back then it wasn't. These people were true pioneers.
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Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
The early shuttle era equipment IS Apollo era equipment.
Every console had to be be more or less rewired between every Apollo mission to accommodate the new/different equipment on the back end and to meet the unique objectives of every mission. MOCR1 and MOCR2 were wired identically, the idea was if you smoked a console or lost a whole room the controller(s) could move to the other control room and continue working.
During the shuttle era the consoles were no longer completely rewired each mission as they more or less standardized on equipment. Eventually all of the hard-wired consoles were replaced with PC's running UNIX (they used Alpha's for a long time, now Linux - Red Hat unfortunately) and of course all the equipment in the server rooms interface with those. The serial networks are now being slowly replaced with IP based equipment. Now that the shuttle is gone the elimination of the serial equipment is increasing.
Another note, the video monitors on the old consoles were HDTV's of their day. Sure they were black and white, but they had more scan lines, nobody that worked on those is on shift at the moment for me to ask but I think they were in the 800 lines range, that's part of why the original Apollo landings were broadcast from a news camera pointed at a monitor instead of from a direct feed - commercial television equipment wasn't designed to work with the video signals we used then.
There is still just a little bit of Apollo era equipment in use today. The drawings of the projection system hint at the mirrors that bounce the projector images to the screen. In MOCR 2 the original mirrors are still used, but they're mostly for tourist and occasional use, the ones in FCR1 were replaced with Mylar mirrors a couple of years ago. The Apollo era mirrors were incredibly thick and NOT safety glass. One of the workers that was sent to remove the ones for FCR1 was one of the same workers sent to install them 40 something years earlier. The telecom frames from the Apollo era are still in use and actively maintained, there's just not as much frame now as their used to be.
More trivia - the communications keysets on those old consoles belonged to the VIS system - which stood for Voice Intercommunications System. That was replaced by DVIS which was Digital Voice Intercommunications system. DVIS in now all but replaced by DVICE, Digital Voice Interface Communications Equipment. They still call all of them keysets. I showed my daughter one of the VIS keysets and asked if she knew what that round thing was for. She had no clue. I explained to her that's how they used to make phone calls.
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