NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Glynn Lunney, NASA engineer and flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, part 1 of 4

What did you start out with in mission control and what did you end up with? Is there big ones or big... Big change, big change in mission control. When we first started, we built the control center down at the Cape and it was variously called the Mercury Control Center and then the M was also a mission control center. And by comparison to this building and facility here in Houston, it was a fairly simple device. As a matter of fact, the spacecrafts were simple. The simple systems, the telemetry was all analog, not digital. And we handled it by processing it in the back room and displaying it on meters in the front room. And as a matter of fact, guys got kind of attached to those meters. They had a hard time going over to the digital system we got here in Houston. We had a trajectory system that used radar tracking data and had to go through a computer. The computer was actually for a while it was on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. And then it moved out to Greenbelt where the Goddard Space Flight Center was. And we used it, sent data back to Greenbelt to Maryland or D.C.

Then back to the control center in Florida and ran our plot boards. We had kind of mechanical plot boards that kind of scratched across the surface. And thinking back on it, it really was kind of simple, maybe even by the standards of the kids who are in this room today, they would call that primitive. As a matter of fact, one of our boys is in flight control here in Houston. And of course, now they have nice displays on their CRTs. It's color. They have all the wiring diagrams of the systems. Very, very nice systems. How about the computer she started out with? Well, we had release. I mean, it's hard to put them, compared them to what we have today. But the computers we had to do this were less than average PC in terms of computing power. There was hardly anything to them. And the voice communications, we take worldwide communications now with satellite systems for granted. But in those days, instead of having all of the communications come back to the control center, direction of spacecraft, we actually sent out teams to the remote sites that were spotted all around the world.

And they also, at their sites, looked at telemetry data on meters, strip charts, and so on. And then they called back to us, radioed back to us, what they saw as they went along. And when the pass was over, when the vehicle passed over, they would send a little teletype summary that took minutes, five or ten minutes to get back, containing just a small amount of data and information. And all in all, it was fairly simple, compared to the way the control center is today. As we moved to Houston, we moved to Houston in 62. And when we started to think about a new control center here in Houston, which we felt we had to have locally, because we were going to be in flights all the time, which turned out to be true. The communications were beginning to be such that we could imagine promoting the data from sites, rather than having to deal with it locally there, and just give an a verbal summary of it. And we built the control center here in Texas, so that it could handle all of this digital, now digital telemetry coming from the vehicle,

back to the computers downstairs, and then displayed on CRTs in this room. But again, black and white, a lot of numbers, they were not very graphical. They were not very easy to manipulate. You had to set them up months and months and months ahead of time as to how you want to look at the data. So by comparison, we came an awful long way when we moved back to this control center. And it continues to be upgraded even to today, where now people at the console have nice color graphics. They have all kind of extra calculations that could be done for them at the click of a mouse, or the punch for a button, and off they go. It's quite a difference. Good, kept for a second. And you want a short one? A short one? Yeah. Gemini was the key to being successful in Apollo. We flew four mandorbiddle flights in Mercury, very simple.

And we got to Apollo. We went to the moon.