Former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz Restores Mission Control in Houston | Hacker News Reader

Former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz Restores Mission Control in Houston

npr.org

207 pointsshortlived78 comments

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.

Well put. I especially like the reference to I.G.Y. I always loved that song.

"Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision"

> Kranz walked the walk by successfully guiding the greatest accomplishment of the era.

The greatest human accomplishment ever.

I don’t know about that. Magellan’s 1519 circumnavigation around what was then unknown parts is also worthy that title.

"Unknown parts" to Magellan and his peers, it's worth emphasizing.

Only commenting on this because "unknown" feels a bit off, especially in the context of greatest human achievements.

Much of the Polynesian Triangle and Indian Ocean trade routes were established hundreds and in some areas thousands of years prior to Magellan. Tierra del Fuego (Straight of Magellan) had been inhabited by nomadic seafarers for thousands of years. Magellan's personal circumnavigation requires including his previous voyages to the Malay peninsula via India.

Circumnavigation a mere ~30 years after Portugal first reached the Cape of Good Hope is extraordinary. Full stop.

But tweaking perspective shows how reaching the Indian Ocean pulled back the curtain on an already developed world, where interconnected maritime trade included both China and Mozambique. The 1300s scholar Ibn Battuta of Tangier visited Beijing, Timbuktu, Singapore, Kenya, and Constantinople within 30 years. Technology and motivations unique to Europeans stitched together routes across the world and did it in a way that enabled others to quickly follow, but there were precious few places visited that someone else didn't already traverse and call home.

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 grew up in Huntsville, AL, in the 60s. Von Braun lived there and the Saturn V engines were tested there. The Stennis test stand was built for the Shuttle engines, I think. The test stand was south of Huntsville, on the banks of the Tennessee river. When they tested the F-1 we could hear it at our house on the north side of the city and it would shake the dishes in the kitchen cabinets.

Testing at Stennis started in the 60's. I know they tested at Hunstville but I thought Huntsville is where they did the Saturn V assembly.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/stennis/pdf/428016main_FS-2010-...

Cool, I didn't know the Stennis site was that old. It looks like the F-1 was tested at several facilities. I found the link below to a Library of Congress document on the Huntsville site, which I'll have to read later.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.al1331.sheet

Actually Von Braun was probably mostly in Marshall FC but during the early engine testing they said he was in Stennis a lot.

Indeed. The engines for the modern successors to the Saturn V are/were being tested there: the BE-4 (edit: maybe the BE-3, not the -4) for Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Raptor for SpaceX’s Starship, and the SSME (as well as the whole core stage) for NASA’s SLS. We’re actually in a very exciting time for space exploration.

Merlins may have been tested at Stennis, but I believe that the Raptors are not.

The early components of Raptor were, indeed, tested at Stennis. The Raptors are now being tested in Texas. Here's an article from 2013 about the early work on Raptor: https://spacenews.com/37859spacex-could-begin-testing-methan...

Interesting, thank you!

Since a sibling mentioned Huntsville, AL, the US Space and Rocket Center now houses the Saturn V stack in the Davidson Center (built for that purpose) along with multiple other exhibits, including the Apollo 16 command module. The Space and Rocket Center is definitely worth a stop if you get a chance.

If you stop in on a Thursday between March and October, a biergarten is set up under the rocket in the evenings. Food's not the best but having sausages and beer while sitting under a Saturn V is a truly unique experience.

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.

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.

Really!? At the exhibits I've been to the rocks have always been kept in sealed containers. Odd question, did you happen to get to.. smell the rock? The reason I ask is that the Apollo astronauts reported that the moon dust had an aroma similar to gunpowder. Left me curious what, if any, smell a rock would have. Ostensibly it'd just smell... like a rock. But on the Earth dust also smells... like dust, not gunpowder.

Oh wow. Before submitting this just found a really interesting article on this topic. [1] While moon dust does apparently smell like gunpowder, nobody knows why. And back on Earth, the rocks return to smelling... like rocks. Very odd.

[1] - https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/3...

I got to go in the big moon rock vault at JSC once and see all[1] the moon rocks. I don't remember any particular smell. Of course unlike in a museum, the ones in there we couldn't touch with bare hands or anything -- we were in bunny suits with gloves and masks and so on. And I didn't try to sniff any! Interesting article, I see that someone else agrees they don't smell like anything in the vault. :)

[1] Not literally all: aside from the small samples out for display at museums etc., about 10-15% IIRC are kept at White Sands rather than at Johnson.

Really, truly!

https://i.imgur.com/kflKLxw.jpg

That is my finger touching a piece of the moon. <shudders>.

It was just a small piece, epoxied to a polycarbonate display where it was protected from being peeled out by vandals. You can't get close enough to put your nose near it, but if you could, I suppose it would have smelled like people's fingers; it seemed to have been polished smooth by thousands of touches.

Also, I was successful in logging off HN all morning and making lives and products better by fixing the restart of this piece of industrial automation. Worn-out over-capacity SSD, apparently. Not quite a retrieval of a moon rock, but now the people putting together Mercedes A-class center consoles will be less frustrated by the heat stake machine that puts them together, and won't have to use the manual heat staker as often. Lunch is almost up - one more look at that picture, then it's back to focusing and working!

I've been to that exhibit and indeed, t is one of a few moonrock samples accessible to the public.

Being able to touch a moon rock was memorable but I never thought to smell it. My immediate inclination, to be honest, was to go off and wash my hands, considering tens of thousands of other index fingers have rubbed against it. It's probably as germy as a wal-mart shopping cart handle.

On the surface of the Moon, there is no oxygen and the rocks are bombarded by UV and other forms of radiation. That's got to lead to some interesting chemical reactions.

It probably smells like fingers, now.

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.

The mind boggles.

How does 55,000HP compare to modern launches (e.g. SpaceX)? Have they become more efficient in harnessing less power to produce more thrust? I’m a lay person when it comes to engineering, but my assumption would be that we do not need close to 300,000HP to lift a modern shuttle up. If we do, though, it again is a magnificent task to complete.

Note that the 300k hp is for the fuel pumps, the first stage max output is roughly 160 million hp.

for those wanting to learn more, here is a Q&A from NASA and they delve into some specs on the STS-111 main engines [1]

>Darrel from Ft. Payne >How much horsepower do the shuttle's main engines produce at the time of lift off?

>NASA: The three space shuttle main engines generate the maximum equivalent of about 37 million horsepower. The fuel pump alone delivers as much as 71,000 horsepower, the oxygen pump delivers about 23,000. Just as a basis of comparison, the fuel pump alone is probably the equivalent horsepower of 28 locomotives. And with the horsepower of the oxygen pump, that's probably the equivalent of 11 more locomotives.

[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/webcasts/shuttle/st...

All five engines together exceeded the electric generation capacity of France at the time.

The 55khp is for each fuel pump; the first stage needed just short of 300khp just to bring fuel from storage to the five combustion chambers. (Probably not the correct term)

Edit: ninja'd by eventualhorizon, whose comment is way more informative than mine!

(please anybody that really knows what they are talking about correct the following)

Newer engines have much higher chamber pressure so your pump demands are going to go through the roof.

For example, Elon says 100,000hp per Raptor here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1076618886932353024

But Raptor is running 300 bar chamber pressure vs 70 bar of the Rocketdyne F1. You have to pump your propellant against that with enough margin to ensure proper atomization and mixture of the liquids. Hard to say what the outlet pressure of the Raptor pumps are but it's going to be intense.

i think a key thing to remember is the manufacturing/fabrication tech. available when the F1 engines where built. Like I said, the welds on it are from a guy with a welder, no CAD/CAM, no robots, no simulation, just some guys with some machine tools, paper, and a shop.

Another thing, if you ever get the chance to visit the Johnson Space Center you can look at some of the control panels and tech. they used. Man, I wouldn't trust a trip to Home Depot and back using that tech and they said, "screw it we're riding this to the moon".

edit: there's a youtube out there of a project to rebuild part of an F1 engine. I think they conclude that a complete F1 can't be built today because a lot of the hand fitting and "tricks of the trade" were never written and down and modern fabrication techniques can't replicate the shape of certain F1 parts. ...something like that

there is a youtube channel trying to rebuild the apollo launch computer.

Very nerdy. The memory is rings of magnets. It is pretty fun though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU

Also, that Saturn V in Houston was flight ready. It's not a model, they separated the stages a little bit so you could see inside, but that is as real as it gets. I could have stayed in there all day.

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.

The arstechnica article is much more detailed with many hd pictures: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/behind-the-scenes-at...

Great pictures, but to get the best resolution you need navigate to photo manually and use the download button.

For those who want all the pictures, I've put them in one archive here: https://we.tl/t-NSdjUDxwCn

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.

[0] https://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-10791270...

I've read that a few times but had to read it again since you posted it. It's a fantastic little piece of writing

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.

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.

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.

The USAF really, really wanted large screen displays, and funded extensive efforts to build them. Pre-computer, they had big manual plotting boards. Big ones, the size of theater screens, with people on lifts updating them. There was the Iconarama, essentially an Etch-A-Sketch hooked to a projector. There was a scheme which drew on movie film with a CRT, developed the film in about 30 seconds, projected the film, and discarded it. This was updated very slowly except during crises. There was Eidophor, used for at least one screen at Apollo mission control. That's a good TV projection system, but high maintenance, involving oil films in vacuum.[1] It's the only early system with serious light output. Everything else was dim.

In my aerospace days, I once came across a USAF study with a history of all the strange large screen displays the USAF had tried. For the Iconarama it said "it is recommended that further systems of this type not be procured."

By the 1980s, projection TV tubes finally had enough light output to do large screen displays.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor

IIRC, it was a higher definition, lower frame-rate format instead of NTSC. These displays favor the character displays over the update speed.

I'd really love to know how the digital part of the images were generated.

55x29 is a curious display geometry.

Where did you get that info?

Eyeball counting of characters in the display pictured.

For anyone interested in hearing more about the moon landing, check out this BBC podcast: 13 Minutes to the Moon.

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!)

Includes interviews with Margaret Hamilton (she coined the term Software Engineering) and Michael Collins (the third man on Apollo 11).

I've watched a few videos of Gene Kranz lately.

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=&...

He gave the keynote at Surge 2013 which was excellent. Excerpts are online here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKQK9BK2I_o&feature=youtu.be...

I was saddened visiting various NASA space travel museums. They mostly bask in accomplishments decades ago- moon landing, shuttle.

The moon landing is an accomplishment that should be basked in for generations.

> 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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_C._Kraft_Jr._Missi...

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193118

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKQK9BK2I_o

[update] gene actually starts talking about 7:32m into that vid

Kranz wrote a book about his experience in mission control which is a good read:

https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/dp...

Houston We Have a Podcast has an episode about the restoration

https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/restoring-the-apollo-miss...

"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.

Got a point there; a I forgot that this was also the time of the Vietnam war / Civil Rights.

Just as an example, Gil Scott-Heron's critique: https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annota..., or: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

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.

Would love to be able to go back to when this was bustling during the Apollo missions. Just a fly on the wall watching it all unfold. Fascinating.

Watch the new documentary "Apollo 11" — it's all that and more.

Any links or pointers to where it can be found? There are just a _few_ Apollo 11 documentaries coming out this year it seems...

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-Douglas-Miller/dp/B07R...

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8760684/

It's light on storytelling and heavy on fly on the wall presentation. The footage is pretty great. You spend a lot of time in mission control.

https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/apollo-11-2019

It's got some great footage, but it's really not. In intersperses shots of mission control with footage of what's going on in the mission itself in such a way that it's hard to get a good idea of what's going on in mission control.

I was disappointed that in a 90 minute documentary they didn't show the three stages of the rocket launching in anything like real-time. It only took around 10 minutes until they were in Earth orbit[1].

Instead the 1st stage launch is shown in pretty much real-time, so you get a good feel for how long the 1st stage took. Then they show stage separation of the 2nd stage immediately followed by the separation of the 3rd stage around a minute later (in reality it took 6-7 minutes). You never see the 2nd stage light or do any work.

1. https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_11i_Timeline.htm

This is pretty cool, does anyone know if there are online archives of drawings for the various stations at mission control houston?

Kranz was the Steve Jobs of his time for NASA.

Would be great to have another one someday at NASA.

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