🚀 go-pugleaf

Texas's dearly beloved (ahem) governor, Bill Clements, has just made life
a little bit more difficult for our friends at NASA/JSC.  Apparently he
has sent a letter to the President of the US requesting that the main
mission control room be declared "unchangeable" so that it may be
preserved as a national historical monument of the lunar landing (or some
such nonsense).

JSC has already been burdened with the control being declared a national
historical site, making changes to the room difficult.  Now Clements wants
to keep the room from changing at all---he wants to retain the appearance
of the room so that it will stay the same as it was in the Apollo days.

This means that if any upgrading of the equipment in that room takes
place, the result must look very similar to what's there.  The consoles
themselves must be more or less the same, the big screens cannot be
changed, the tiers must stay, etc.  NASA had great plans to replace the
consoles with ones that were much more up-to-date technologically: larger
and color screens that are driven by individual microcomputers (that is,
workstations), built-in keyboards, "soft buttons" (with labels that are
computer changeable), and all sorts of other fun stuff.  But with this new
restriction, alot of this could be very hard to implement.

This hasn't gone all the way thru yet, but there is really not much that
can prevent it.  Politically it looks good and only a "small group" of
people would be "inconvenienced" by it.

I hadn't known about this before, but this is yet another reason why the
consoles in the main control room are Apollo vintage:  some people don't
want to change them because they see them as some sort of historical
monument.

Personally, I think that if Clements is so hot on this idea that the money
for a new building to house a new up-to-date control room for the shuttle
program (which is about what it would take at this point) should come out
of Clements' salary!

Sigh.

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil@Rice.edu>