Building 30 at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, is hallowed ground to people who are part of the civil space industry. At approximately 3:18 p.m. on July 20, 1969, a room full of expectant engineers exhaled a collective sigh of relief when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, uttered the eight famous words: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
While the crew of Apollo 11 made history on the moon, the staff at NASA Mission Control made history on Earth. The team in Building 30 remotely orchestrated the Moon landing from a control center that managed the navigation, precision and control of the mission.
Decades later, ground-based Mission Operations Centers — MOCs — remain a vital piece of every space mission not only for NASA, but also National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as well as a many other federal and commercial space programs.
“Thanks to Johnson Space Center and NASA’s lunar missions, we’re all familiar with the concept of mission operations centers. We have seen launches and control centers on TV and in the movies,” said Utah Gannon, associate director of program management at Raytheon, which develops and delivers to government and commercial customers advanced MOCs with end-to-end ground station support. “That model, of remotely controlling a space asset, has continued with dramatic changes in technology.”
As space missions and technologies continue to evolve and modernize, advanced MOCs must therefore evolve and modernize alongside them, according to Gannon, who said Raytheon is leading the charge by building a new generation of MOCs that are more scalable, automated, secure, modular, and adaptive than their predecessors.
Modern MOCs turn data into decisions
MOCs today aren’t just about shepherding and safeguarding astronauts. Equally, they’re about shepherding and safeguarding information.
“Mission operations centers enable mission data collection,” Gannon…
Read the full article here
