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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
On Monday, August 7, 2017 at 11:04:12 AM UTC-4, wrote:
Does anybody know of how to volunteer with the systems analysis? Is there a like program for the Kennedy Space Center launch control room? I guess the first order of the project would be to turn on the stations and see if the computers still work. Maybe there is a "monitor mode" that reports a valid turn on state of the computer? Or maybe the term is "standby mode". I remember going to a talk on NASA rules of system design. A hideous rigor of design documentation. I worry about even finding all the design documentation for the control room. Any ways, a standard simulator is noting other than x inputs and x outputs. But variable electric circuit interfaces appears an issue. A simple leveling circuit is not that hard to design for each station. In reality the system design for scenario input to each simulator is the hard part. The abstract spacecraft would contain each and every variable of state. Sensor state is distinct from navigational state. How is a navigational report generated? I guess just use a simulator to report navigation? Here I am very ignorant so I can not speak to the subject any longer. |
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
On Friday, August 11, 2017 at 11:19:53 AM UTC-4, Rob wrote:
wrote: On Monday, August 7, 2017 at 11:04:12 AM UTC-4, wrote: Does anybody know of how to volunteer with the systems analysis? Is there a like program for the Kennedy Space Center launch control room? I guess the first order of the project would be to turn on the stations and see if the computers still work. Maybe there is a "monitor mode" that reports a valid turn on state of the computer? Come on, separate computers for each station? Do you think they had that in 1969? There was an IBM mainframe, it probably is no longer there and would cost too much to get running. Put a Raspberry Pi in each station to blink the lights and act upon the buttons... Well I take back everything I said, I guess. Somebody familiar with them out there? |
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
JF Mezei wrote:
On 2017-08-11 11:19, Rob wrote: Put a Raspberry Pi in each station to blink the lights and act upon the buttons... Is there a point in doing this versus just having a static room with all displays off? It was my understanding that they wanted to restore it to working condition capable of running a demo like it was during operation. Whether it is pointless or not, well that is another question... |
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
Jeff Findley wrote:
In article , says... JF Mezei wrote: On 2017-08-11 11:19, Rob wrote: Put a Raspberry Pi in each station to blink the lights and act upon the buttons... Is there a point in doing this versus just having a static room with all displays off? It was my understanding that they wanted to restore it to working condition capable of running a demo like it was during operation. Whether it is pointless or not, well that is another question... 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. It is a common problem for all restoration and preservation projects. Personally I don't see the value in preserving everything that we have once done in working order. It would cost a lot of money, that can't be spent on new things. When we want to keep everything we have once built, the burden will become more and more for every generation after us. IMHO it is better to make room for new things. It would have been better to keep and re-digitize the magtapes that were recorded during the missions. We would have the high-quality pictures to look at. Even preserving image material costs money, but less than all those physical things. |
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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. |
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
JF Mezei wrote:
On 2017-08-13 14:24, Rob wrote: 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. But if you have the tapes of telemetry received from the Apollo modules, then you can faithfully recreate what appeared on displays in mission control room. When you need instead of the number of satellite dishes around the world is a PC that can generate telemetry data as it was received in the 1970s with the same rate/timing. (BTW, one of those satelites dishes was at Carnarvon Western Australia where a museum was created on the site). You would have to hope that a complete set of tapes is still available for at least one mission. The Apollo 11 tapes recorded at Honeysuckle Creek are known to be lost. |
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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. Why? 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). Why is this something worth preserving as software emulation only? 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. So you change all the hardware, but build a software emulator so that you can run the old software? What's the point? -- "Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar territory." --G. Behn |
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NASA Chief Retiree's "Save the Houston Control Room" Program
JF Mezei wrote:
On 2017-08-13 18:07, Fred J. McCall wrote: So you change all the hardware, but build a software emulator so that you can run the old software? What's the point? So you can run the missions with the recorded telemetry/voice/video data, and with the software which controlled it back then. What good does that do you? Restoring the original hardware so you can power it on doesn't do much good unless you can actually run the missions. Otherwise, you just have everything turned on on stand=by because there is nothing actually running. So it is more important to be able to run the software with the original telemetry data to recreate the missions than to have the authentic restored hardware (in my opinion). Neither is 'important'. One (restoration of hardware, etc) is historical. The other is merely pointless. -- "Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar territory." --G. Behn |
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