A Giant Step In Communication

[Music] minute 30 okay H I'm on the Roger Neil Neil this is Houston loud and clear break break Buzz this is Houston radio check and verify TV circuit breaker [Music] in that's one small step for [Music] man one for [Music] man this has been man's Greatest Adventure the most difficult the most hazardous Journey ever attempted flinging man out across a quarter million miles of space to a harsh airless world with life and death hanging on each flaming Blast Off step into vacuum and Rocket burn and we made it we won the race we found a multitude of treasures it's true by the time the last Apollo splashed into the ocean right on time and on target the suspense had gone out of it the painstaking thoroughness the systematic skill of that whole operation had made flying to the Moon seem incredibly the safest form of travel but in that very operation lies one of the treasures one that may turn out to be more important to than all the rest that one is here on Earth centered here near Houston in the bou country west of galvaston bay at the Johnson Space [Music] [Applause] Center here in assembling the skills that guided the moon flights something quite special something quite new in the world had been created what had come about was the development of new systems for enlarging human competence ways of meshing together men and machines to accomplish large and difficult tasks to attack problems at a grand scale as complex as the problems of our expanding Society problems of cities of Transportation of environments of [Music] energy in short an arrangement to enhance intensify to amplify man's capacity to do what man at his best does best to make decisions and to communicate with other men tus 17 final guidance release during the long countdown and the three-hour hold Apollo 17 was directed from NASA launch control Cape Kennedy ignition sequence started all engines are started we have ignition 2 1 Z we have a liftoff we have a liftoff and it's lighting up the air it's just like daylight here at Kennedy Space Center as the Saturn 5 is moving off the pad it has now cleared the tower at the moment the Saturn 5 booster cleared the tower control was handed over to Houston the stage looks good altitude 1.1 miles as the spacecraft dwindled from sight and started out across the miles of space a vast amount of information about that ship and its crew streamed back and forth between Apollo and the man spacecraft center2 the torrent of data pouring into Houston was instantly sorted and processed and displayed in the mission control center point out display do throughout the flight a complex Communications Network linked controllers ship and crew into a close immediate contact this exchange of information spacecraft to Houston and Houston to spacecraft reached a peak during The Descent to the Moon surface descent had been scheduled at a time when both the Luna module and the Command Module having separated behind the moon were both in line of sight of the Goldstone antenna in California is a decim 8 thank you guard I'll give it a final treatment for okay oh man are we down among them babeo the Telemetry data coming back was directed through the routing computer to the groups that monitor onboard systems life support and biomedical systems the astronaut's physical condition and environment fuel air water batteries the spacecraft's attitude acceleration velocity3 continuous voice links were maintained between the spacecraft and between each craft and the capsule Communicator at Houston that's formative 410 standby for pitch Jack there it is proceeded and there it is Houston there's Camelot Target I see it we got them all the flood of information from both craft continued to flow into the displays at Mission Control was distributed to computers for realtime calculation and prediction and to the flight controllers and the flight director for his decision okay Challenger you are go for landinge altitude degree you're through 800 ft start a little high little forward je I don't need the numbers anymore going down at five forward a little 90 ft midle forward velocity 80 ft going down at three going down at 10 cut the eigh doot it feels good feels good 20 ft going down at two 10 ft going down about two very little dust very little Drive contact okay Houston the Challenger has landed bger Challenger that's super but we is here when there is finally a moment to look back it appears that the astounding success of the space program is rooted in a cooperation among NASA scientists and engineers and American industry NASA and many of the major high technology corporations in this country team together to supply the hardware propulsion systems knowledge and skill needed to put man on the moon hilco Ford provided the Telemetry and communication systems the systems that receive the data processed and sorted and displayed it they also were responsible for the command and control operation the training of people to use the networks of information channels and the design and operation of the mission control center itself this business of ours seems just like chasing this is Bob Ben FCO Ford's chief of operations at the Johnson Space Center this thing we call Telemetry that's three things fening the data sending it to the user and then showing it to him originally messages were sent by morse code at all 30 words per minute and then with teletype we got to 100 to 120 words per minute and that's where we were with Mercury then with a geminy and Apollo we boosted that to a 100,000 words per minute it's really hard to visualize the vast amount of data coming from the Moon to Mission Control during his Apollo 15 moonwalk astronaut Dave Scott performed an experiment based on an assumption of Galileo he dropped a feather and an iron ball side by side to see if in a vacuum they would fall at the same rate while they were falling Scott's heartbeat respiration rate skin temperature energy consumption and the power supply feeding the life support systems and oxygen reserves as well as an equal amount of data from James Irwin His companion on the moon were being sent out at the same moment the charge and the batteries on the lunar rover the condition of both stages of the lunar lander the multiple outputs of the scientific instruments set up on the moon Surface by the euts as well as those left by all the previous astronauts join in and orbiting above the command service module is adding its own package of information about astronaut L warden's person environment and the onboard systems all of which is sensed converted and transmitted through space to be caught in the Goldstone antenna 250,000 mil away before the feather and ball fall together to the ground and now for Skylab we're processing five times as much data l or not I'm ready for your path okay Jack uh it's a midc course 2 SPS GNN SE star is 25 okay what out to plus 310 Mission time is 035 control Power on finger on the W trust a switch okay man bounces around okay that's too late let's break for lunch wow boy that seemed real yes we feel the more realistic trainy is the more that you will get out of it this is ambers Davis manager of fco's flight Control Department in Houston our job is to train flag controllers so that they can control the mission we train them here and our crew station trainers so that they really understand the physical reality of the spacecraft not to ask a man who's performing an experiment on the telescope Mount to throw a power switch that's down in the workshop area for example and before each Mission we run hundreds of hours of simulations right in mission control simulations train these large groups to work as a team and that includes the astronauts who are in the trainers over in Billing 5 and the remote sites Goldstone Spain Australia and so on they learn voice disciplines when and how to report in how to handle problems and emergencies this work this training builds confidence confidence in the equipment that you can count on it that the controllers can use the information they get to make decisions so that they they know when they Mash a button they're going to get the display they asked for when they press a button to send a command that command is going to get sent to the spacecraft and it gives the astronauts confidence in the flight controllers so that on flight day the plan that we've thought out in such detail will actually work in practice 63 seconds after the launch of the Skylab space station at the point of Maximum stress till told Houston that the unmanned spacecraft was in trouble over the next information coming down from the Skylab sensors the flight's controllers were able to deduce that the large aluminum microm meteorite Shield had torn away which left the cylinder containing the Living Spaces exposed to the direct heat of the sun temperatures inside the craft rose to 130° the disintegrating Shield had ripped off one of the solar panels and trapped the other leaving sky lab seriously short of power immediately the greatest fix in space history was begun a heroic effort to save the sky laab Mission here in the giant water tank at the Marshall Space Center in Alabama the astronauts tried out schemes to restore the Skylab to usefulness their space suits waited to simulate the weightless conditions they would experience in orbit they tested designs for sun shades that could cool the ship to livable temperatures [Music] this is astronaut physicist and former filco scientist Ed Gibson a member of the third Skylab crew who talks about the events that followed when the Double started our Telemetry told us in detail what Pete and his crew would face this allowed us to come up with some good Solutions before they went into orbit the deployment of a parasol or sun shade out of an airlock reduced the temperatures inside to a workable level but erecting that one remaining solar array to gain more power was a bit difficult and required a space walk P Conrad and Joe Kerwin pulled the Eva off beautifully and the Skylab program back in business it was a team effort in a very large sense our Telemetry and the TV from our first look at the vehicle let us look over the shoulders of the guys up there and the NASA team with Ingenuity and a lot of hard work came up with the solutions some of the really interesting questions that we hope to answer on Skylab have to do with how well men can live and work in space to help with this there are a number of instruments that measure our physical condition located down in the crew quarters area as we exercise on this bicycle measurements are made of our heart rates of the electrical activity of our hearts in three dimensions and even of the amounts of oxygen consumed and of carbon dioxide produced another instrument measures the quality of our [Music] sleep all of this data is recorded and then beamed down to control and short bursts as the sky laab passes over its receiving stations for much of this work even though it occasionally looks like play we will learn more about man himself [Music] in the workshop space and up the multiple docking adapter we have experiments which are formed in biology and in physics and in metals technology and also from here we control the sophisticated Apollo telescope Mount which is designed to learn more about our primary energy source the Sun the Apollo telescope Mount carries about a ton of sensitive instruments and cameras all aimed at the same point on the sun's surface each one sensing a different part of the sun's Rays the red light of hydrogen x-rays ultraviolet some of which can only be viewed from space outside of the Earth's atmosphere the telescope Mount and several other experiments look at different astronomical events in the sky including the dramatic visitor to our Christmas Skies cutek Comet Skylab studies of the Comet radiation may lead to a new understanding of these unusual bodies as well as the nature of our solar system also there in the multiple docking adapter we have a battery of cameras and instruments which we use to observe the earth below and with these instruments we hope to learn how to accurately survey our Earth Resources from orbit and in time to manage preserve and even to a degree replenish them for man's benefit L River photographing the Earth from airplanes and now from space has added A New Perspective to our view of the world what is new is the use of sophisticated electronic devices which sense Heat radio and microwaves to produce pictures of the earth and new films sensitive to infrared and ultraviolet light that can see through CL clouds and Haze to give us startling pictures in which the colors while unreal are meaningful to the trained eye this is a mapping of an attack of corn blight in the midwest taken through several consecutive months on infrared film this area around Trinity Bay in Texas is being used as a test site for these new techniques here it is viewed by film sensitive to infrared seen by radar scanned by a sensor that records heat differences in the water temperatures in the power plant's cooling Pond show clearly when the outputs from these and other sensors are brought together by a computer they can reveal more and more information here in a national forest the computer is producing an inventory of the number and types of trees the green is Pine the red is Hardwood [Music] the imagery produced by this new field has the strange look of an alien planet but the study of these images can give Experts New insights into the nature of severe storms the ability to predict floods and earthquakes to map the Earth's natural resources and locate oil and needed minerals to protect the environment and to improve crop Yi yield by managing water resources and controlling plant disease investigators work with images produced by this filco system and other experimental systems to find ways of making the information transmitted from space useful to men on the ground in this task computers remote sensors machines and men are linked into a system designed NASA's vast systems for handling and using but training and organizing people for managing projects of a complexity quite Beyond any ever attempted it amounts to a new way of going about doing things the Greeks men have known that the Earth is round ball hanging in space even this knowledge did not prepare us for that moment when live from the Moon we saw our cloudy sphere floating alone in Blackness viewed from such a distance the needs of that small planet seemed very close on this Voyage of exploration we have discovered a treasure in the minds of men and rediscovered a world on which to spend it the circle has been closed with the intricate Arts of thought and execution that brought us to the Moon we can turn back to look at the problems and possibilities of Earth [Music] [Applause] [Music]