David W. Brown

It was there in the Apollo Mission Control Center that Kranz had a view like few others during the highest highs and lowest lows of the moon race. As a flight director, he helped lead the complex human and technical operation that managed the triumph of the Apollo 11 moon landing 50 years ago. He also rallied and refocused NASA mission flight controllers after the tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967, when Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chafee died in a fire during a launchpad simulation.

Kranz would have to show up early before each tour to police the place. He had to pick up trash left on computer consoles that had once landed men on the moon. Water bottles, Coke cans. He would empty brimming wastebaskets.

“This place was not representative of historic mission control,” Kranz said. It was likewise a technical mess. “The configuration of the consoles in no way represented where we were and what we did.”

On Friday, Kranz and Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, cut a ribbon marking the official reopening of the restored Apollo Mission Control Center. It was a three-year, $5 million project, and every inch of the famed heart of America’s lunar aspirations was repaired and refurbished. Its reopening comes three weeks before the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, and helps to kick off Apollo festivities across the country.

Apollo mission control had been abandoned in 1992, with all operations moved to a modernized mission control center elsewhere in the building. Center employees, friends, family — and anyone, really, who had access to Building 30 — could walk in, take a seat, take a lunch break and take pictures.

While they were there, they might take a button from one of the computer consoles. Or a switch or dial, anything small — a personal memento from an ancient American achievement. The furniture fabric and carpet underfoot grew threadbare. The room was dark; none of the equipment had power. Wires hung where rotary phones had once sat. The giant overhead screens in front of the room were damaged, and the room smelled of mildew. Yellow duct tape held carpet together in places.

“You knew it wasn’t right — you just knew,” said Sandra Tetley, the historic preservation officer at the Johnson Space Center. “But it was not a priority. We are an organization that’s moving toward the future, so there is not a budget to do things like this.”

The project began in earnest six years ago. The anniversary loomed, and that was the catalyst to fix up mission control, and to do it right. “We wanted to meet a high standard to restore it, and we were able to meet this 50th anniversary,” Tetley said.

The National Park Service established the Apollo Mission Control Center as a National Historic Landmark in 1985. But once they had resolved to restore the facility in 2013, Kranz, Tetley, the restoration project manager Jim Thornton and others were stymied at every turn. There were funding issues and internal turf wars.

The Apollo Mission Control Center is in the middle of an operational building where life-or-death decisions are made for missions in flight. Judgment calls regarding spacewalks, station-threatening debris and solutions to mechanical malfunctions leave little margin for error — or interruption by errant tourists.

Eventually, however, Space Center Houston, a nonprofit educational complex and space museum, took the lead on fundraising efforts. The nearby city of Webster, Texas, donated $3.5 million of the $5 million necessary to complete the project. A Kickstarter campaign and independent donations filled in the rest.

Like the Oval Office, or the Assembly Room of Independence Hall, mission control is a distinctly American room — one so ingrained into culture that to say its name is to conjure it crisply in the mind, as if you had been there, even worked there. And the restoration was completed in a way that’s true to its place in the American historical imagination.

Four long rows of pale green consoles fill the room. There are white panels overhead and beige new carpet below. Lights dance purposefully on the consoles, with each one playing Apollo-accurate video broadcasts as would have been seen at the time of the moon landings, or displaying grids of numbers and prehistoric computer code. On four giant displays in the room’s front are maps, matrices and astronaut positional plots.

On the consoles are the objects seen in photographs from the Apollo era. Ashtrays and coffee cups, staplers and stopwatches, pens and pencils, headsets and rotary dial phones. There are mission control manuals 3 inches thick and canisters for pneumatic tubes. Binders and eyeglasses and cigar boxes sit next to cans of RC Cola and packs of Winston cigarettes. The room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as if engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. Every item is authentic, painstakingly researched from grainy photographs.

“It was a herculean effort by the team to really pull off what we pulled off in that room today,” said Jennifer Keys, project manager of the restoration team.

Ceiling tiles that matched the original were eventually recovered from a lobby phone booth elsewhere at the Johnson Space Center. Preserved wallpaper was discovered behind a fire extinguisher. All had to be meticulously matched or fabricated identically. Original paint was found for the consoles. And across those consoles, the artifacts of a time gone by.

“We tracked things down on eBay, from people’s donations — whatever we could scrounge up. We did a scavenger hunt across Johnson Space Center to find things like trash cans, chairs and binders,” said Keys.

The flight crews of Apollo mission control were known for their attention to detail. It’s how they got every astronaut home. The restoration team showed no less respect for fine details, and the effect is uncanny.

From the observation gallery, you can all but see phantom engineers in white shirts and black ties speaking into headsets very calmly about high-stakes orbital maneuvers, see them making notes and pushing those buttons. The stories there play out in your imagination, and yet before your eyes.

Christopher Craft, who invented flight operations for NASA when the agency was formed, is credited with designing mission control. Nothing like the space program had existed, and there were no models for how it should be done. The air traffic control model wouldn’t work, because the tower in that setting has a line-of-sight on everything in its aegis. Mission control’s domain, on the other hand, is abstract: a specific set of procedures at any one time, and problems that are solved with mathematics and moxie.

The genius of its design is reflected in the present-day mission control center that runs operations for the International Space Station. The computers are smaller, the monitors larger, tabletops wider and office chairs nicer. But the design of the room is virtually identical. Five giant screens loom above, with mission status updates and feeds from orbit. And though the time of the Apollo generation draws rapidly to a close, the things used by mission control operators are still basically the same.

From the gallery, it is all plainly visible. Desktops are lined with coffee cups and Coca-Cola, pens and paperwork, binders, headsets and eyeglasses. The room is crowded and calm, the stakes still high. As NASA plots an American return to the moon in the next decade with the Artemis mission, the stakes will get higher yet.

Guided tours for the public will begin Monday. This past week, Kranz walked into the newly restored mission control for the first time. He approved.

“It was dazzling,” he said. “You couldn’t believe this. All of a sudden you were 50 years younger and you wanted to work in there. I wanted back in that room to work.”

NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon

HOUSTON — After Gene Kranz retired in the 1990s, he started to give occasional tours to VIPs at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

NASA Reopens apollo mission control room that once landed men on moon

Scientists representing NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed a spacecraft and mission Tuesday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas that would explore Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

The unusual satellite is believed to be an object — similar in many ways to Pluto — from the solar system’s icy Kuiper belt that was captured billions of years ago by the giant planet’s gravity. And Triton is thought to harbor an ocean, hinting at the possibility that a world quite distant from the sun may contain the ingredients for life.

Unlike multibillion-dollar proposals for spacecraft that the agency has usually sent to the outer solar system, this spacecraft, named Trident, aims to be far less expensive, the mission’s scientists and engineers said, or the price of a small mission to the moon.

“The time is now to do this mission,” said Louise Prockter, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and principal investigator of the proposed mission. “The time is now to do it at a low cost. And we will investigate whether it is a habitable world, which is of huge importance.”

Visits to the outer solar system are usually conducted as NASA flagship missions that cost billions of dollars, like the recently concluded Cassini mission to Saturn or the Europa Clipper spacecraft set for launch in the 2020s.

While these projects have produced significant achievements, smaller, less pricey missions also might advance planetary science. On Mars, for instance, no single spacecraft did everything, but in aggregate and over time, the robots sent there revealed the planet’s watery past and set the stage for future astronauts.

That’s why the scientists behind the Trident proposal, which will be formally presented to NASA later this month, are seeking support under the agency’s highly competitive Discovery program, for missions that are supposed to cost less than $500 million.

NASA aims to launch these missions every two years. The most recent Discovery program was the InSight lander, which reached Mars in November. The next is expected to be the Lucy mission, which will explore asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun.

Trident will be up against proposals for more extensive surveys of the moon, a visit to Jupiter’s moon Io and a return to Venus. Trident proponents hope that the possibility of exploring the solar system’s most distant known planet without spending billions of dollars usually required for such a mission will persuade the agency to support it.

Neptune and its moons were last visited in 1989 during a brief flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which took Earth’s first and only close images of the solar system’s eighth planet.

Voyager 2 also recorded data showing possible plumes of water being blasted from Triton’s interior. Since that time, many planetary scientists have wanted to return to Triton. It was recently declared a top priority for exploration in NASA’s Roadmap for Ocean Worlds.

“Triton shows tantalizing hints at being active and having an ocean,” said Dr. Amanda Hendrix of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who was a leader of the Roadmap study. “It is a three-for-one target, because you can visit the Neptune system, visit this interesting ocean world and also visit a Kuiper belt object without having to go all the way out there.”

Studying such places, she said, could bring new insights into how ocean worlds originate, how they vary and how they maintain liquid water. For instance, water in Triton’s ocean could be much colder than the usual freezing point, but the presence of ammonia could preserve it in a liquid state. Such clues will help in the search for life beyond Earth.

Neptune is 30 times farther from the sun than Earth is. Over the last couple of decades, the notion of where life could arise in the solar system has greatly expanded.

Scientists once thought the habitable zone ended at Mars, because places farther out would not be warmed enough by the sun. But then an ocean was discovered beneath Europa, one of Jupiter’s big moons, and then farther out, another beneath Saturn’s Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.

If Trident confirms an ocean exists on Triton, it would mean that an even broader expanse of the solar system may be capable of sustaining life.

To get to Triton, the spacecraft would fly in a fast, straight trajectory after an orbital assist from Jupiter, similar to the flyby that was used by the New Horizons spacecraft to visit Pluto in 2015. It would rely on a payload of scientific instruments to conduct ocean detection and atmospheric and ionospheric science. The spacecraft would photograph the entirety of Triton, which is the largest object in the solar system that has not yet been fully imaged.

“We are comparing with the Voyager encounter in 1989, which was built on early 1970s technology, essentially a television camera attached to a fax machine,” said Karl Mitchell, the proposed mission’s project scientist, of the Voyager imager. “It was remarkable for its day, but it doesn’t have anything like the efficiency of a modern digital imaging system.”

Timing is also critical because of the moon’s changing seasons as Neptune makes its orbit around the sun.

“In order to view the plumes that Voyager saw in 1989, we have to encounter Triton before 2040,” Mitchell said. Otherwise, because of the positions of the objects in their orbits, Triton will not be illuminated again for over 80 years.

This article originally appeared in <a id="62db91c3-1f5e-49dd-be8c-8dd9da93bb4f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/triton-neptune-nasa-trident.html">The New York Times</a>.

Journey to Distant World, but on a Budget

HOUSTON — Is it time to go back to Neptune?

Journey to distant world, but on a budget

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David W. Brown

Articles written by the author

NASA Reopens apollo mission control room that once landed men on moon

Journey to distant world, but on a budget