New
#11
Covington, Ozro
READ YOU LOUD AND CLEAR!
The Story of NASA’s Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network
by Sunny Tsiao
Covington, Ozro M., Mr.
Hall of Fame - Mr. Ozro M. Covington
Thanks from Neil Armstrong
After reading the history provided by slartybart, it brought back some memories. Thanks!
One trivia bit, our "high speed" links to Houston ran at 4800BPS. We had two 4800BPS links. Not all the downlink spacecraft data could be sent in realtime to Houston. The downlink telemetry data from Command module was 51.2K/bps and the downlink from the Lunar module was 72K/bps. Everything was recorded on tape and sent to Houston, but that was after the fact. Many times, Houston would have us breakout a certain parameter (voltage or switch) have us verbally report to them the value or if it changed because they couldn't get everything realtime. Along with the Telemetry data, there was also the tracking data, voice, etc. Everything came down on the "Unified S-Band" (called "USB" at the tracking stations) link from the spacecraft.
I was really into the early space program, enjoyed every bit of it. Some friends of mine were going to New Orleans the weekend of the moon landing. I declined to go because I had to see it on TV. One of the coolest pictures for me was the first photo of the Mercury 7 astronauts in their jet flight gear. It just gave so much promise of things to come.
It was all so fascinating and amazing. Kids today would be spoiled by all the SciFi/CGI/Games they have now. Back then, there were no home computers. And those rockets were known for BLOWING UP! Watching it on TV is burned into my memory. I remember looking up at the Moon and thinking, "There are people up there!". We watched at school too, everything else stopped if they were on TV while we were in school. I still find it one of the most amazing things human beings have accomplished. A Guy
Ars Technica published a wonderful article in celebrating the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, was a great read:
Apollo 11 turns 45: a lunar landing anniversary retrospective | Ars Technica
The part where they explained how they put together the information on the CRT monitors and projections all the controllers and engineers at Mission Control were looking at was simply mindblowing.