Today we "officially" had a ribbon cutting ceremony for our new home at the Mission Control Center. The International Space Station flight control team has a brand new room to conduct day to day operations. This is new room is known as FCR-1 (pronounced "ficker one"). Actually, the room is quite old...you see, this room was the control room starting for the first manned Apollo mission,Apollo 7, which launched 38 years ago today. This control room was also the control room for America's first space station, Skylab. And yet again, this control room was the control room for the first Space Shuttle missions.
While this control room has seen operations in the 60s, 70s, and 80s (perhaps the 90s too), it has been modernized for us. Everything is essentially brand new. New consoles, new carpet, new paint, new computers...etc. Our room is much more spacious than our previous home. It will be great to fly out of our new room. My first opportunity will be next week.
There were some big names present at today's ceremony...big names in the space business any way. Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, and Glynn Lunney just to name a few. The room was packed and the ceremony was nice. I had the priviledge of being in the room the first time it went operational on Friday of last week. I think i might be in some of the pictures taken that day...although it'd be hard to see me. Our console is at the front left of the room again. Once NASA updates their website with the new layout of FCR-1, I'll post it so that you can see what it looks like.
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2 comments:
That's really cool! Wish I hadn't been stuck in an FOR off site!
It was cool; it really tied the history of Mission Control in with our everyday console shifts. Also helped I was standing beside Gene Krantz....
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