38 | New Scientist | 13 July 2019384,400 km
The moon’s average
distance from Earthreally what it was. Everything was happening
so fast; it was like drinking out of a fire hose.”
Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, had
the idea to combine the training for flight
controllers with the astronaut crew training,
because astronauts would work closely with
mission control during the flights. Members
of the simulation group needed to organise
these “integrated simulations”.
In a back room at the first Mission Control
Center at Cape Canaveral they used the
Mercury cockpit trainer, a rudimentary
spacecraft simulator that contained replica
switches, gauges, dials and controls – just like
the real Mercury spacecraft that would soon
carry the first Americans into space. All the
instrumentation was connected to a computer
console that could manipulate the readouts.
In turn, the readouts were wired to the basic
consoles developed for the flight control
team so it could monitor the spacecraft’s
“dashboard” during a mission.
The simulations used a room-sized
computer to recreate the gauge readings
of many events that would take place in a
NAspacecraft during a real mission. Ways were
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simulations, mission controllers went through
every system, working out what could be done
if the spacecraft malfunctioned. This helped
them produce guidance for what to do in the
event of almost every potential glitch.
Looking back now, the initial training runs
were crude, says Miller. But they built a close-
knit team and helped prepare the astronauts
and the flight controllers for all the possible
contingencies in the various phases of flight.
When the Mercury missions to Earth orbit
began in 1961, the simulations continued.
The weekly trips to the launch base in Florida
turned into longer stays, mostly because
of launch time slips due to bad weather or
problems with rockets. One stretch had
Miller and Koos there for six weeks straight.
The entire space programme kept moving at
an incredible pace. Just as the Mercury flights
got started, President Kennedy challenged
NASA to reach the moon before the end of the
1960s. The simulation group knew that would
mean an even bigger job. After Mercury came
the Gemini missions, again to Earth orbit, but
they were longer and involved space walks.
And the Apollo missions that followed wouldalso developed to inject problems during the
simulations. Staff could fake a huge drop in
cabin pressure, for instance, or loss of the
manoeuvring thrusters. They could also
make the various gauges in the cockpit show
readings that called for a simulated abort or
flight modifications.
Unrealistic problems were deemed off
limits, but the simulation team’s goal was
to think about all the things that could go
wrong so that flight controllers could develop
solutions to have at their fingertips. Using“ Everything going on
at NASA in its early
days involved
figuring out how to
do things that had
never been done”
THE MOON BY NUMBERS
29.5 Earth days
The length of the moon’s day3
The number of new missions to
the moon set to launch in 2019