What stands out to me about Kranz's view of technology and the future is his optimism. While it might be tempting to dismiss this as dated postwar scientific idealism (e.g. Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y."), Kranz walked the walk by successfully guiding the greatest accomplishment of the era.
Kranz's inclusion of "love" adjacent to "skills" and "knowledge" is the lesson our current technological culture could stand to learn the most from.
I was there a couple weeks ago. They had the Apollo control room blocked off to visitors for the rennovations so we saw a different one. The tours are kinda boring but you have to suffer one to get to the Saturn V. That thing is incredible, looking at the welds on the engines knowing they were done by hand blows me away. Also, seeing how large the turbo pumps are and imagining the LOX flowing at full tilt is scary. I get the feeling the term "control" is used very loosely once those engines are ignited.
I've been on the tour and I didn't think it was boring. I learned a lot of past and present space exploration. I think there are 2 or 3 different tours you can choose so return trips are recommended.
I agree the Saturn V is a thing of monstrous beauty. The pictures do not do it justice. You have to stand next to it to really appreciate the magnitude of the engineering and workmanship.
Also another good NASA site to tour is the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi where they test the engines to this day. I believe it's where Wernher Von Braun spent most of his time.
I went on the tours about a year ago and found them very interesting. I think you do need a good guide and group, if you sat in the back and no one asked questions I can see how it would get boring. Completely agree that the Saturn V was incredible.
To me the most impressive part of the tour was the piece of moon rock that you could literally touch. That's a chunk of rock that an astronaut picked up from the moon, across 200,000 miles of vacuum.
Thousands of engineers came together to make that achievement happen, working at the bleeding edge of what was possible 50 years ago, and here I am slacking off on Hacker News on a Monday morning instead of figuring out why this unit I keep having to power cycle won't stay online.
One of my favorite statistics to highlight the engineering absurdity of the Apollo program is that the 'fuel pump' for each F1 operated at approximately 55,000 horsepower. And they still needed five of them to get off the pad.
I remember visiting Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL as a Cub Scout and walking up to the Saturn V. It was laying on its side, and I was a short kid, but the size of just one those engines blew me away. I’ll never forget that sense of wonder and amazement.
I saw a Saturn V at Kennedy. Before that, I had absolutely no concept of the size of those rockets. It is absolutely epic in scale. It is in my view one of the greatest wonders of the modern world.
The Level 9 tour is anything but boring, though I can see the larger tours being less interesting when you don't get to look in the Soyuz trainer or go to the National Buoyancy Lab. However, you don't need to take a tour our pay anything to go to the rocket park. It's free and open to the public, you can just tell guard at the main gate that's where you're going and they'll let you through.
Every time I see a story on mission control I always search for the ground speed check story[0]. Probably one of my favourite pieces of writing and a really cool story. Never fails to lift my mood. I particularly like how he describes how air traffic controllers voices are modeled on the Housten Centre voice.
you pretty much have to assume the rest of ground control picked up on it too and the person handling the request was for a few days special himself too.
I'm very curious about the LCD panels that replaced the CRTs in the consoles. The information displays seem very nice for the time period and I'd love to see any information on the original typography used. As I understand, most screens are a static physical overlay over computer generated numbers on a CRT, captured from that CRT by a camera and then broadcast to the control consoles. My guess is that it was done like that because the computer didn't have a character buffer and had to do beam racing to draw one line (or column, like the IBM 2260) at a time and doing that saved memory for the labels.
We can see two distinct fonts, and I assume the wide one is from the stencil and the narrow one computer-generated, but the wide also has some telltale signs of computer fonts if you look at the "A"s.
The original system was NTSC monochrome video. The screens were all multiplexed as analog cable channels, and any display could access any screen. Note the "TV Channel" number display to the upper right of the screen. Other locations on site also had a cable connection and could view all the screens.
The system was built by Ford Aerospace. The same system was used at NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain, and at the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, the USAF control center for their satellites. Into the mid 1980s, which was kind of embarrassing.
Setups where any station can view any screen are common in command and control. Everybody can view the screen where the action is without hovering over the person controlling that station.
> Now Kranz, 85, has completed another undertaking: the reopening of Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
This article seems to imply that no mission control has been active in Houston since 1992, which is not true - what has been reopened (really, renovated for tours) is the 'historic', older mission control center used during the apollo missions (MOCR2).
I worked as a summer hire at KSC in 1987, and one of the things that stuck out most in that experience was when they took all of us summer hires on a full tour of the facility.
We got to walk besides the Crawler-Transporter 2 as it was moving to the launch pad...that was awesome. Touring the VAB and taking a ride to the top...amazing view. Same for the actual launch pad and them describing why the lightning arrestors had to be aligned perfectly to the N-S magnetic poles (to maximize dissipation, of course).
The saddest part of the tour is when we went to the KSC version of the Apollo control room and it was in total disrepair (this was 1988 remember). I remember thinking "what a shame this looks like this..I don't get it", but this was the time between the first Challenger explosion and overall, the place wasn't at its best.
I think it's amazing that Gene led the restoration of the Johnson control room...I just hope that people don't forget to do the same at KSC.
In 1995 when Apollo 13 the movie came out, it felt like a very long time after the actual events. The same length of time again has almost elapsed but 1995 seems not that long ago.
In 1995 I thought the real Gene Krantz, an old man so I'm amazed by how well he looks today.
I have a friend who works at nasa. He took us into this room a about 7 years ago and it was depressing. People were literally stealing stuff attached to the control boards. Glad to see it restored.
A couple weeks ago someone posted a link to a real time re-creation of the apollo 11 mission. It's amazing watching videos of everyone in that room, listening to the chatter on all the radio channels, and seeing pictures scroll by from the moon, all in real-time. It does an amazing job bringing you behind the curtains, almost like you're a part of the actual mission.
I saw this as a child (full of wonder) in the 1980's. It was still in active use during the shuttle missions. I've always wanted my children to see it and now that can.
Gene is awesome. I had a chance to watch him speak at SurgeCon 2013, there's lots of lessons from dealing various mission crisis events that are still applicable today to operation teams.
"The room also brought back memories for Kranz of a shared sense of purpose.
"That group of people united in pursuit of a cause, and basically the result was greater than the sum of the parts. There was a chemistry that was formed," Kranz said."
The Cold War undoubtedly helped, though my impression (I am not American) is that there was a greater sense of social cohesion back then (that did not include minorities).
Assuming social cohesion is a public good, i.e., public policy should help bring it about without having to engineer a cold war, how would a society go about it? National service?
> The Cold War undoubtedly helped, though my impression (I am not American) is that there was a greater sense of social cohesion back then (that did not include minorities).
Not to be dismissive, but... no. You're talking about the time of the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam war. When you hear Americans talk about how utterly divided these times are, keep in mind that, on the whole, we have no sense of history and the attention span of a gnat.
Greater sense of social cohesion is often when dissenting views were more successfully hidden, quashed or marginalised. Depends whether you read the news or the history book. Read some biographies of comedians, actors or other non-military types who got drafted, or the lower rank military whether special forces, simple squaddie or aircrew in whichever era. You'll get a very different picture. Usually the far more interesting picture than that from politicians, general or admiral, but much less sense of purpose showing.
Perhaps something can achieve that, but I suspect it needs to be as clear, obvious and existential for all as the historical moments. Even then it won't be nearly as cohesive as history makes you think.
[+] [-] cjf4|6 years ago|reply
Kranz's inclusion of "love" adjacent to "skills" and "knowledge" is the lesson our current technological culture could stand to learn the most from.
[+] [-] driverdan|6 years ago|reply
The greatest human accomplishment ever.
[+] [-] chkaloon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrydag|6 years ago|reply
I agree the Saturn V is a thing of monstrous beauty. The pictures do not do it justice. You have to stand next to it to really appreciate the magnitude of the engineering and workmanship.
Also another good NASA site to tour is the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi where they test the engines to this day. I believe it's where Wernher Von Braun spent most of his time.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|6 years ago|reply
To me the most impressive part of the tour was the piece of moon rock that you could literally touch. That's a chunk of rock that an astronaut picked up from the moon, across 200,000 miles of vacuum.
Thousands of engineers came together to make that achievement happen, working at the bleeding edge of what was possible 50 years ago, and here I am slacking off on Hacker News on a Monday morning instead of figuring out why this unit I keep having to power cycle won't stay online.
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
The mind boggles.
[+] [-] Zelphyr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyjh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihartley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouronnes3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breakingcups|6 years ago|reply
For those who want all the pictures, I've put them in one archive here: https://we.tl/t-NSdjUDxwCn
[+] [-] mmsimanga|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-10791270...
[+] [-] ElCapitanMarkla|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|6 years ago|reply
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/misc-...
We can see two distinct fonts, and I assume the wide one is from the stencil and the narrow one computer-generated, but the wide also has some telltale signs of computer fonts if you look at the "A"s.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
The system was built by Ford Aerospace. The same system was used at NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain, and at the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, the USAF control center for their satellites. Into the mid 1980s, which was kind of embarrassing.
Setups where any station can view any screen are common in command and control. Everybody can view the screen where the action is without hovering over the person controlling that station.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miobrien|6 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads
I’m on episode 3. So far there have been interviews with Steve Bales (guidance), Gene Kranz (flight director), etc.
(It was recommended by someone else in another thread. Thanks to whoever that was!)
[+] [-] jonny_eh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|6 years ago|reply
Inspiring leadership of a different sort than seen today. Very effective, especially in the Apollo missions.
Plenty of them are online: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gene+kranz&oq=&...
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKQK9BK2I_o&feature=youtu.be...
[+] [-] peter303|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grahar64|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cat199|6 years ago|reply
This article seems to imply that no mission control has been active in Houston since 1992, which is not true - what has been reopened (really, renovated for tours) is the 'historic', older mission control center used during the apollo missions (MOCR2).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_C._Kraft_Jr._Missi...
[+] [-] cubano|6 years ago|reply
We got to walk besides the Crawler-Transporter 2 as it was moving to the launch pad...that was awesome. Touring the VAB and taking a ride to the top...amazing view. Same for the actual launch pad and them describing why the lightning arrestors had to be aligned perfectly to the N-S magnetic poles (to maximize dissipation, of course).
The saddest part of the tour is when we went to the KSC version of the Apollo control room and it was in total disrepair (this was 1988 remember). I remember thinking "what a shame this looks like this..I don't get it", but this was the time between the first Challenger explosion and overall, the place wasn't at its best.
I think it's amazing that Gene led the restoration of the Johnson control room...I just hope that people don't forget to do the same at KSC.
[+] [-] barking|6 years ago|reply
In 1995 I thought the real Gene Krantz, an old man so I'm amazed by how well he looks today.
[+] [-] post_break|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] augustusseizure|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193118
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kapilvt|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKQK9BK2I_o
[update] gene actually starts talking about 7:32m into that vid
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] totally|6 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/dp...
[+] [-] celias|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/restoring-the-apollo-miss...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] noir-york|6 years ago|reply
"That group of people united in pursuit of a cause, and basically the result was greater than the sum of the parts. There was a chemistry that was formed," Kranz said."
The Cold War undoubtedly helped, though my impression (I am not American) is that there was a greater sense of social cohesion back then (that did not include minorities).
Assuming social cohesion is a public good, i.e., public policy should help bring it about without having to engineer a cold war, how would a society go about it? National service?
[+] [-] justin66|6 years ago|reply
Not to be dismissive, but... no. You're talking about the time of the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam war. When you hear Americans talk about how utterly divided these times are, keep in mind that, on the whole, we have no sense of history and the attention span of a gnat.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps something can achieve that, but I suspect it needs to be as clear, obvious and existential for all as the historical moments. Even then it won't be nearly as cohesive as history makes you think.