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Old August 13th 17, 07:24 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Rob[_8_]
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Default NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program

JF Mezei wrote:
On 2017-08-13 08:36, Jeff Findley wrote:

Cool goal, but a hell of a lot of work and even more money. If running,
it would take a lot of electricity (which generates heat which
necessitates cooling, which costs more electricity). Laudable goal, but
it would cost a fortune. Things like capacitors will have to be
replaced because they do go bad after that many decades.



Retoring the actual electronics doesn't make sense in my opinion. But
restoring the software and providing an emulated platform to run it on
and drive the displays would be valuable endeavour.

Since the moon shots have not become routine and may never happen again
in a number of lifetimes, this is something worth preserving. (a time
when the poilitical system could set goals and achieve them).

If you run the mainframe emulation on a PC, it won't be consuming that
much power nor generate lots of heat. Remember that a PC today is orders
of magnitures more power than what an IBM mainframe in the late 60s
early 1970s could do.

One could debate whether the displays in the mission control room should
be updated to energy saving LCDs or kept as old CRTs (consumer more
power etc). But if you could recreate "real time" processing of data as
it happened for each flight, it would be worth doing some "original
equipment" sacrivices such as replacing CRTs with LCDs.


I don't expect that the original software is something that you could
run in demo mode without trained operators just for display purposes.

Remember that a lot of the control had to be done by the astronauts
and ground crew. Key in verbs and nouns, enter parameters.
Without that, you will just have some simple routines that perform some
small step of the mission.

When you want to run automatic demo mode you have to add another layer
of software on top of it, that executes the procedures done by the
astronauts and ground crew. And of course you need to insert the data
obtained from the actual flight hardware.