Just after the spacecraft safely touched down on the lunar surface, Charlie Duke said to the crew, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue—we’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” The hard work and preparation of the men who stayed back on Earth was what made John F. Kennedy’s dreams of space exploration come true.
It took the restoration crew roughly six years to return the Apollo Mission Control Room to its original retro appearance. Every inch of the room was cleaned and restored by workers, enhancing the 1960s pistachio palette seen on the consoles, as well as ridding the room of 50-year-old gum stuck in places people thought would never be found. Let that be a lesson to us all.
From the artifacts sitting on the consoles to the displays projected at the front of the room, every detail has been carefully put in its proper place. Peep the American flag hanging in the back of the room—this flag went to the Moon on Apollo 17, was planted in the ground, then returned home as a souvenir. Next to the flag, a duplicate of the plaque placed on the Moon hangs on the wall.
Perhaps the only aspect of the room that wasn’t preserved was the thick stench of smoke, burnt coffee, banana peels and pizza boxes. But the ashtrays, pipes, cigarettes and coffee mugs sit in the room as reminders of the aroma. And yes, the Styrofoam cup is authentic to the ‘60s—it’s not an original artifact, but we’re certain this one will last for years to come.
In case you’re worried we didn’t get detailed enough, check the binders in the room. Each one is filled with authentic documents that would’ve been used during the Apollo missions. Some of the documents have been recreated, but many of them were copied from originals that employees had saved for 50 years.
Each console was rigged to send tubes throughout the building, often filled with important documents, but also stuffed with sandwiches and cake (all of the essentials to send men to the Moon).
Several of the surviving Apollo alumni visited mission control for the grand opening of the room at the end of June. Except for the smoke, they say the room looks just as they remember it did 50 years ago. It’s one giant leap—back in time.
This week, you can watch us salute our #Apollo50th heroes and look forward to our next giant leap for future missions to the Moon and Mars. Tune in: https://go.nasa.gov/Apollo50thEvents
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Just after the spacecraft safely touched down on the lunar surface, Charlie Duke said to the crew, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue—we’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” The hard work and preparation of the men who stayed back on Earth was what made John F. Kennedy’s dreams of space exploration come true.
It took the restoration crew roughly six years to return the Apollo Mission Control Room to its original retro appearance. Every inch of the room was cleaned and restored by workers, enhancing the 1960s pistachio palette seen on the consoles, as well as ridding the room of 50-year-old gum stuck in places people thought would never be found. Let that be a lesson to us all.
From the artifacts sitting on the consoles to the displays projected at the front of the room, every detail has been carefully put in its proper place. Peep the American flag hanging in the back of the room—this flag went to the Moon on Apollo 17, was planted in the ground, then returned home as a souvenir. Next to the flag, a duplicate of the plaque placed on the Moon hangs on the wall.
Perhaps the only aspect of the room that wasn’t preserved was the thick stench of smoke, burnt coffee, banana peels and pizza boxes. But the ashtrays, pipes, cigarettes and coffee mugs sit in the room as reminders of the aroma. And yes, the Styrofoam cup is authentic to the ‘60s—it’s not an original artifact, but we’re certain this one will last for years to come.
In case you’re worried we didn’t get detailed enough, check the binders in the room. Each one is filled with authentic documents that would’ve been used during the Apollo missions. Some of the documents have been recreated, but many of them were copied from originals that employees had saved for 50 years.
Each console was rigged to send tubes throughout the building, often filled with important documents, but also stuffed with sandwiches and cake (all of the essentials to send men to the Moon).
Several of the surviving Apollo alumni visited mission control for the grand opening of the room at the end of June. Except for the smoke, they say the room looks just as they remember it did 50 years ago. It’s one giant leap—back in time.
This week, you can watch us salute our #Apollo50th heroes and look forward to our next giant leap for future missions to the Moon and Mars. Tune in: https://go.nasa.gov/Apollo50thEvents
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
This
machine represented the SGI’s low-end workstation offering. It was targeted
towards Mac users (DTP…) that needed more graphics and processing power than they
could get from Macintosh Quadra systems. It’s a sleek pizza-box computer with
just a single quiet fan inside (unlike other SGI systems). However, in
comparison with non-SGI competitors, it was not slow. It had at least 100-MHz (64bit)
MIPS processor, at least 16MB of RAM (reasonable configurations started with 32MB)
and multiple graphics card options available. 10Mbit/s LAN, ISDN modem and
video inputs (composite / S-Video / a digital port for the bundled webcam) were
integrated on the logic board in all configurations as standard.
My Indy is
from 1995 and has a more powerful 150MHz MIPS R5000 CPU. On the other side, it
is equipped with the lowest possible graphics card (XL8/XGE8/Newport) that supports
no more than 256 colors and was introduced with the early machines.
I always
thought that Indy was the only SGI system without any 3D acceleration when sold
with XL8 (2MB of 64bit video RAM) or XL24 (6MB of 192bit video RAM for true
color modes) graphics cards. I expected just a crappy framebuffer (with BitBlt)
and nothing more – like in Sun and HP machines. I was wrong. The REX3 chip
inside the Newport graphics is pretty capable. Although all the 3D
transformations and triangle setup are done in software, the chip can raster
triangles with smooth (Gouraud) shading and per-vertex alpha-blending. Even
Z-Buffering is partially accelerated using the chip (Z-Buffer is stored in
system memory though).
In fact,
this chip is not very far from early PC 3D accelerators (1996-1997) in terms of
functions… except for the texturing support which was not available even with
higher-end workstation-class 3D accelerators in 1993. This is for the first
time I see 3D accelerated OpenGL (1.0) on such an old graphics card - and in
256 colors. To be correct, the scene with triangles has just 16 colors because any
real-time graphics requires double-buffering. Each byte of the window in video
memory contains one pixel from both buffers in the GBRG-GBRG arrangement of
bits.
The graphics
card is faster than I would expect. The pixel fill rate for smooth shaded
triangles is ~50Mpix/s. If you add alpha-blending, you will get ~20Mpix/s. That’s
5-20 times as fast as the Windows NT 4.0 software renderer on a laptop with
133-MHz Pentium MMX and a 2D-only graphics chip. The speed in 3D is more
comparable with 3Dlabs Permedia, S3 Virge DX and other consumer 3D accelerators
from 1996.
