Doug’s Off Topic 12/1/2020 – Buttons of Mission Control

https://youtu.be/ri_7vfzyamQ

What great memories! One of the greatest things about my long career in MCC is that I spent about half of it in the “old” control center, built in the early 1960’s with technology that was state of the art at the time – and was used from Gemini through the first fifteen years of the Shuttle program. The switches in this video were our interface to just about everything – from the Mission Operations Computer to the display system and especially the communication systems. There must have been hundreds of thousands of these things in the building!

Flight controllers quickly learned (by fidgeting when they were bored) how to take them apart and mess with bulbs, colors, and labels. It was not entirely unheard of for a controller to show up for a simulation (we looked down on screwing around during missions…) and find all of the labels on their panel had been switched. Of course, you didn’t want to get caught doing this, as some technician would have to spend hours restoring the configuration and certifying it for flight! Technicians, at times, outnumbered flight controllers in the building, so you could always call someone to come replace a bulb – but most drawers had a few spares on hand and it was easy enough to change them yourself….or so I heard (cough….).

Those bulbs were incandescent and generated a lot of heat. There was a panel that was common to all consoles, located at an angle between the horizontal “desk” and the vertical display panel. These were about ten inches long and maybe six inches high and had a complete matrix of lighted buttons. You would press a certain set of buttons, then hit “execute” to tell the computer to do something. So long as you didn’t press “execute”, you could turn on any combination of buttons you wanted. If you were chilly, for instance, you could turn them all on and warm your hands. Or…if you turned half of them on and put a sealed package of pop tarts on top of the panel, then covered it with a book, you’d have steamy, warm pop tarts in about ten minutes.

Then along came the mini-computer consoles that did away with dedicated lights and buttons in exchange for configurable displays. No romance, no pizazz….and no pop-tart warmers…..

Ahhh…The good old days!

Interestedly these bulbs are still around. Good ones are hard to locate from all the look-a-likes and not cheap straight from Honeywell. In the Honeywell rockers they use typically use LED, but when you turn down the panel lights they go off as they use resistors and the standard GA rheostat panel voltage controller, not PWM. So - research through the Honeywell literature that looked like the linked video and internet searches turned up a name brand, with engineering specifications with a good long life and a filament holder. A reasonable price too.

Oddly, Aerotronics had been using inferior bulbs as they are everywhere, and accepted their short life. My 10Friend shared our find (stumble really) and now they use the one that has a 1000 hr life. Finally we helped Jason, a real turnabout, and he was thrilled for his certified business.

Did you ever notice that the high quality of components of yesteryear that yielded top reliability gives way to cost reduced, outsourced cascades until the parts are just junk. Then they just go away.

737 ‘Apollo Era’ lights?

Those bulbs look like the ‘387’ light bulbs on the B737 annunciator lights. How long has the 737 been around? Apollo Era?

Thanks for sharing your story Paul! You gave us a tiny glimpse of MCC... behind the manuals, procedures and rules. A little insight of the human beings and their interaction with machines that controlled real live space ships. Love the fact there were a few spare bulbs in drawers and warming of pop tarts.... priceless stuff that only insiders can share.

Paul 5r4 said:

Thanks for sharing your story Paul! You gave us a tiny glimpse of MCC... behind the manuals, procedures and rules. A little insight of the human beings and their interaction with machines that controlled real live space ships. Love the fact there were a few spare bulbs in drawers and warming of pop tarts.... priceless stuff that only insiders can share.

Click to expand...

If you liked Paul's post about the buttons and switches of Mission Control, you will love his book! It gives you an insiders view into all sorts of interesting things about NASA, Mission Control and, of course, the entire Shuttle program. Highly recommended!

bored

"Flight controllers.....fidgeting when they were bored"

From back in my A-6 days: every Intruder squadron owned several dedicated tankers. They were old A model bombers, re-equipped with a dedicated internal hose and reel refueling package, designated as KA-6Ds. They did retain a few cockpit panels from their bomber days, one feature of which was an intervalometer selector, allowing crew selection of the spacing of a "stick" of bombs, in feet. A up or down switch would send the numbers in a little window spinning, much like the wheels in a casino slot machine.
When a crew drew a tanker assignment for the cycle, flying round and round overhead the boat, waiting for a "customer", that bored feeling came up frequently. One stress reliever was the "intervalometer game". The pilot and bombardier/navigator (or, hose reel operator, in this case) would each take a turn, holding down that switch, watching the numbers spin, then releasing it at just the right time, to where it would stop on a nice round number, say 200, for "the win".
Yep, idle minds.