phil@rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (05/24/89)
Texas's dearly beloved (ahem) governor, Bill Clements, has just made life a little bit more difficult for our friends at NASA/JSC. Apparently he has sent a letter to the President of the US requesting that the main mission control room be declared "unchangeable" so that it may be preserved as a national historical monument of the lunar landing (or some such nonsense). JSC has already been burdened with the control being declared a national historical site, making changes to the room difficult. Now Clements wants to keep the room from changing at all---he wants to retain the appearance of the room so that it will stay the same as it was in the Apollo days. This means that if any upgrading of the equipment in that room takes place, the result must look very similar to what's there. The consoles themselves must be more or less the same, the big screens cannot be changed, the tiers must stay, etc. NASA had great plans to replace the consoles with ones that were much more up-to-date technologically: larger and color screens that are driven by individual microcomputers (that is, workstations), built-in keyboards, "soft buttons" (with labels that are computer changeable), and all sorts of other fun stuff. But with this new restriction, alot of this could be very hard to implement. This hasn't gone all the way thru yet, but there is really not much that can prevent it. Politically it looks good and only a "small group" of people would be "inconvenienced" by it. I hadn't known about this before, but this is yet another reason why the consoles in the main control room are Apollo vintage: some people don't want to change them because they see them as some sort of historical monument. Personally, I think that if Clements is so hot on this idea that the money for a new building to house a new up-to-date control room for the shuttle program (which is about what it would take at this point) should come out of Clements' salary! Sigh. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu>
calderaa@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (Alan J. Caldera) (05/24/89)
In article <3310@kalliope.rice.edu>, phil@rice.edu (William LeFebvre) writes: > Texas's dearly beloved (ahem) governor, Bill Clements, has just made life > a little bit more difficult for our friends at NASA/JSC. Apparently he > has sent a letter to the President of the US requesting that the main > mission control room be declared "unchangeable" so that it may be > preserved as a national historical monument of the lunar landing (or some > such nonsense). > > [Other text explaining this assinine proposal deleted] This is about the most assinine thing that I have heard Bill Clemets suggest. I say that they should remove the old equipment and set up a new control room containing it somewhere around NASA Rd. 1 Dont get me wrong, but I think its about time to modernize NASA's control systems. It probably costs the taxpayers more money to maintain that old equipment than it would to replace it all with updated technology. As far as who should foot the bill for this monument, send the bill to Bill (and George if he approves it). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Usual disclaimers apply: direct flames to me or /dev/null ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alan J. Caldera IIIIII UUU UUU Indiana University II U U Bloomington, IN II U U IIIIII UUUUUU ARPA: calderaa@silver.bacs.indiana.edu UUCP: {inuxc,rutgers,pyramid,pur-ee}!iuvax!silver!calderaa BITNET: calderaa@iubacs.BITNET
dmoore@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Douglas K. Moore) (05/28/89)
I dont mean to disagree with Bill, but I would think that NASA would have either updated the control room a long time ago or built another one after the Apollo program .... I knidof assumed they had but I forget NASA is a branch of the government. The IDEA of preserving the old/current Apollo vintage room sounds like a good Idea to me, prehaps it is the Historian in me. I would like to see a new room built for the shuttles needs be construted, not a revamping of one made for another purpuse that has passed into antiquity. I would think that NASA would also support this as it would give them the opertunity to build an optimal facility for the current operation, while alowing the past to be preserved. Granted I am not as intimantly aquainted as some in this group with the control needs of the shuttle as they differ from the apollo program, nor am I at all confident that the necessary funding could be found in Mr. Clements salary or elsewhere. However, if the funding hurdles and space limitations at JSC arnt problems I would support the construction of of a new facility. Really no offence to your view intended Bill. -- Douglas K. Moore '90 Dept. of Biology Harvey Mudd College The views expressed in this, are not necessarily the views of the Students, Facility, Trustees, or Staff of Harvey Mudd College; The other Claremont Colleges or its Board of Govenors; The US Commission on Civil Rights; The Bates Areonautics Program; or myself