Word: houston
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WITH remarkable clarity, the words reached the earth from a quarter of a million miles away in space. "Houston," the distant voice announced, "Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." Though somewhat overlooked in the drama of the lunar landing, the intricate electronics systems that brought Neil Armstrong's voice back from the moon were almost as much of an engineering triumph as the rocketry that carried him there...
...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...
...signal. From Parkes the signal was relayed overland to Sydney, flashed to the Moree Earth Station 200 miles to the north, beamed up to the Intelsat communications satellite 22,300 miles above the Pacific Ocean, relayed to Jamesburg, Calif., passed by microwave ground signal and coaxial cable to Houston and finally transmitted to New York for distribution to individual television sets. In spite of the separate systems and the incredibly circuitous routes, both sight and sound arrived in precise synchronization in millions of homes around the world...
...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 of IBM 360 Model 75 computers with a total capacity...
...Beyond Houston, the communications web stretches around the earth-and above it. Key parts of the network are the huge radiotelescope dishes at Goldstone, Calif., Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia, 17 ground stations, four U.S. Navy ships scattered over the seas and eight communications planes-all receiving and transmitting vital bits of data throughout the mission. No one is more aware than the astronauts themselves of how impossible a flight would be without such support...