How Mission Control's Big Displays Worked

Very interesting presentation. Thank you!

Thanks for putting this together Fran! Excellent work indeed!! I’m always curious about the “behind the scenes” information with any big project. The Apollo space program is one of my favorite big projects. I remember watching it real time on television when I was a kid. Your video satisfied my curiosity about the mission control “behind the scenes” stuff very much!! Thanks again for all your work!👍👍😎

Darrell Ashby

You got it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKWIX7LcV5Y - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClVjPsq6vsU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsfLdHcTefs

Fran Blanche

No... I have done that kind of thing in the past for projects and universally these large companies purge all their records every decade or so, and it never goes anywhere.

Fran Blanche

Loved the video. Thanks for putting this together, absolutely top work. The Eidophor is an extremely fascinating bit of kit, how we take things for granted nowdays!

Anton

thx Fran

Really interesting video and nicely presented.

Oh yes....Bach also wrote a "Coffee Cantata" - a story about a daughter who drinks too much coffee.

...Oh yes, one more thing: I would love to see you explore pipe organs - there are some modern ones built like the ones Bach would have played using what is called "tracker action" and then there are others using electro pneumatic action (I think the control voltage is about 15 volts DC). It is the oldest keyboard instrument. A lot of them are in churches (your local Episcopal Church probably has one) - and modern organ consoles are built to AGO standards (AGO = American Guild of Organists). There are lots of "stops" that activate different sounding pipes - they are called "stops" because they keep the pipes from sounding. It is a unique world, but the technology is certainly fascinating. Johann Sebastian Bach, who drank too much coffee and fathered 20 children with 2 wives (one died and he remarried), wrote the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) to "test" new organs with! In his day, wind was supplied by people pumping one or more bellows, but today, we have electric blowers. There is lead content in many organ pipes - so this is the original "heavy metal." As a side note, I was putting music together for a couple getting married one time, and the groom, much to his future wife's chagrin, said he liked Van Halen. I was able to pull out some pipe organ music that was 100 to 300 years old that really satisfied him! I felt like a true Bach Star that day!

Back in the 1960's when I was about 3 (I was born in late 1965), I remember watching various missions on TV with my mother - both of my parents were fascinated by the space program. (My Dad is a retired Ph.D. electrical engineer, and my mother is a retired Spanish teacher and church organist. I never took Spanish - I rebelled and took Latin, but I became both an electrical engineer and church organist! I have degrees in both fields, but don't do much music these days.) Anyway, I found the large displays at Mission Control quite fascinating even at age 3.

That was great. Have you contacted anyone at Ford to see if their historian has anything relating to the era. They may be able to point you in the direction of people and places..

Fran, thanks for all of your research and descriptions on this historic vision system. I always wondered how they got all of that data up there and synced way back in the 60s. I guess they had to be extremely careful that no one in the “Bat Cave” accidentally walked in front of any of the active projections! It also explains why there was never any “flicker” in the images like what shows up on the console CRTs when filmed. There was not any refresh rate mismatch like you get when film shoots at 24 frames per second and NTSC TVs are at 30 frames per second. And who knows what the refresh rates of those NASA computer CRTs were? I read an article on how they produced the incredibly vibrant large displays in the 1983 film "War Games" and for the longest time I thought a really powerful computer displayed all of those color stroke-written graphics in real time. Turns out that the computers took 5 minutes per frame and a camera would shoot the screen at the end of that rendered image and the whole process would start over. When they rear-projected all of those displays in the "War Room" they had actually synced a whole bunch of standard film projectors that contained the results of those 5 minute renderings now happening at 24 frames per second, just like the main film cameras. So even in 1983, we still did not have CRT projectors that were bright enough, with enough contrast, to project a truly sharp, brilliantly-saturated video image. I guess by 1989, the date of your document proposing upgrading the system, they had figured it out. But all that ingenious work in the 60s just goes to show just how creative we could be with electro-optical displays. Wonderful research! Loved every minute of your video!

Matt Wietlispach

I find it amazing what a zinc plated, vacuum tube culture could achieve with a technology barely ahead of stone knives and bear skins.

David Peaker

Really fascinating video Fran. Thanks!

I have pics somewhere of Disneylands Mission To Mars as it was being stripped apart and the control room used video projectors that shined up from under the floor as I recall.

BunnyBrewster

It's in the NASA documentation about the 'plotters' and 'spotters' and how the basic principle worked.

Fran Blanche

Ah, I had figured that the icons would be a static slide projected onto a mirror, and the mirror would move to position the icon on the screen. However, if that were the case, the icons would have distorted the further they got from dead center (barring any corrective optics?). So, your idea that they were controlled by an X-Y plotter armature sounds a lot better, especially given your also-excellent observation that that's likely how they did the real-time graph plotting. It didn't even occur to me that the graph could be "single use"/disposable in that fashion. Excellent work, and great video -- thanks for sharing!

Travis Snoozy

I shared your video on Twitter with Scott Manley, and others. He said it was more detailed than one he did. You did good!

Tim

Great video Fran. Thanks!

William E Lee

Crazy! Thanks for the video!

Mikeybg

I wonder how many other people like me, just assumed that they had really BIG tv screens at their disposal- after all it was NASA with an infinite budget! Fascinating stuff Fran thanks for this video.

Mike Hughes

Really fascinating- thanks Fran

Mark Wilkes

Did not know the word "Eidophor" before this video. Overall fascinating tech. Scraping mechanical needles! Love it!

Great Joe

I used to work at the Cape inside what was once the Range Control Center, which had long since been converted to office space mostly, but the big control room was intact. There was a similar, though lower tech, projection system there. I also got to sneak into Mercury mission control before it got bulldozed and saw what was left of that room. What a fool I was for not photographing it all.

Tom