Word: controled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Eagle's on-board computer was being asked to make too many calculations in the frenetic moments before touchdown. It had begun to balk at having to track Columbia while also making the final descent. "It gave us grave concern," said Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft. Mission Control quickly spotted the cause and ordered the rendezvous radar turned off to remedy the situation. And then, unhappy with the terrain of the landing site, Armstrong took over the manual controls. Had he not done so, the LM would have set down in an area strewn with boulders...
...runway." Seconds later, tension dissolved; Eagle was airborne, headed into a lunar orbit. Within four hours, the module had rendezvoused and docked with Columbia on the far side of the moon. Then Armstrong and Aldrin left the LM so quickly that ground controllers, caught by surprise, sounded a bit put out. "You beat us to the punch," groused Mission Control. And why not? The two moon walkers were as anxious to return to the mother ship as Columbia's Pilot Collins was anxious to see them...
Although scientists are fairly certain that the moon supports no life, NASA has taken care to guard against lunar infection. During the homeward voyage, Columbia's environmental-control system circulated the air within the capsule more than 100 times, passing it through special filters. On earth, the precautions were equally stringent. Besides the astronauts, the only persons allowed in the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) were a doctor and an engineer. During the next three days, about all that relieved the tedium was a video-tape replay of the moon walk. The most interested viewer was Collins...
...later by the huge radio telescope at Goldstone, Calif., which has a dish-shaped antenna 210 ft. in diameter. Next, the signal was relayed to Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C., where the message was broken down into its individual parts and routed to Mission Control in Houston. The astronauts' voices then traveled via ordinary telephone lines to radio and TV stations in New York for rebroadcast throughout the U.S. and the world. In one of the longest roundabout routes in the history of radio, Goldstone also relayed the voices back into space where they were picked...
...like an orchestra conductor," says Christopher Columbus Kraft, flight operations director for the Apollo missions. "I don't write the music, I just make sure it comes out right." Chris Kraft's unlikely podium is the windowless Mission Operations Control Room on the third floor of Building 30 at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston. His musicians are the 30 controllers who sit at four rows of gray computer consoles, monitoring some 1,500 constantly changing items of information registered on gauges, dials and meters. Kraft's primary instrument is a pair...