Shame that they don't have the resources to restore the original computers.
Maybe I'm weird, but the details of the computers and however they were producing the graphics with mid-70s technology is actually more interesting to me than the simulator itself.
Are they using computer graphics by that point? Or are they stuck with computer-controlled cameras over over physical models?
Edit: Found some high-level documentation of the whole computer systems[1]. Based on the description of the visual system on page 117, it looks like has specialised hardware for lit, flat-shaded polygonal graphics.
IIRC, there were companies running pure CGI simulators in the 70's, so that could be the out of the window imagery for the astronauts. I'd love to know more about the software (and, mostly, what appeared on the three MFDs of the original shuttles, as well as detailed images of the glass-cockpit MFDs that are on this simulator.
IIRC, the original ones were not raster displays, but long-persistence X-Y displays.
They should just leave the simulator as-is and accept that it cannot be restored together with all the mission control infrastructure. Keep it as a museum artefact. And then build a new simulator from scratch with modern flat panels and a big PC, for people to use.
Or just throw flat panels at the current simulator, hook it up and let people take a ride for money.
While it's a imperfect preservation from a historical standpoint giving a lot of people the opportunity to experience it would help preserve it for the future.
Museums often struggle with this. Some historically interesting piece of whatever languishes and then eventually gets chucked whereas something that's more completely unremarkable and low value and common enough to let people actually interact with it winds up being the star of their collection.
Years ago I worked as a software tester in the Mission Control Center. This was in simpler times, before 9-11. On lunch breaks I would wander the campus and poke my head in areas to see what was up. Many times employees would give me an impromptu tour of the area. One of these times was this full-motion shuttle simulator. They were about to take it on a test run, and asked me if I wanted to go along for the ride. It was an amazing experience, and one of many fond memories of working there.
What a well written article, pleasure to read; summarising a cool project with a passionate team working to accomplish the goal of preservation.
For others interested in space flight computers and simulators, in case you haven't read it, there is a great book that came out a few years ago about writing the code for the Apollo program. Specifically the landing module computer and simulator. The book is also a wonderful look into the work teams, their dynamics, characters, and a brief glimpse into the politics and culture of the world around them as they frenetically worked, to get to the moon.
Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir.
by Don Eyles.
Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir
> I'm not an astronaut, just a commercial pilot, but I was fortunate enough to "fly" the shuttle simulator about 12 years ago. It was an amazing experience. When the tech strapped us in tight and showed where the airsick bags were, I knew it was going to get interesting. It's just like an airline simulator (pretty sure it was built by the same company), except it tilts 90 degrees for launch. I observed a few launches in the "jumpseat". They were doing real work and testing an anomaly that occurred on a previous shuttle mission to see how it would affect systems in various abort scenarios. It really shakes a lot during launch, but obviously there is only 1g max. It's on hydraulics and by pushing over and dropping, it feels like you are decelerating or going weightless, if only for a few seconds.
> After the real work was done, they let me shoot a couple of approaches into Kennedy. It has an intuitive Heads Up Display, similar to what some 737s have. The control stick was quite unique however. It sits between your legs like a fighter jet and it's fly-by-wire with an unusual activation mechanism that I can't really describe. It was very sensitive so you have to make short inputs, almost flying it with just 2 fingers. It's just like flying an approach in an airplane except you were coming in at 250-300 kts most of the way, you were flying a 18.5 degree glide path (normal plane is 3 degrees), and there was no 2nd chance . The HUD guidance plus the approach lights at Kennedy made it very easy to fly an approach. I had no trouble landing safely, but it was nearly impossible to get a "greaser". I think I bounced one and floated one. I left Buidling 5 with the biggest grin on my face that day
What happened to the Shuttle simulator at NASA Ames? NASA has a huge Vertical Motion Simulator (60 feet vertically, 40 feet horizontally) at Ames, with interchangeable cabs. They had a Shuttle cab for that.
Keeping the cockpit lights on is about as far as it usually goes. The Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos has some aircraft where the cockpit lights are lit, but that's all. The Museum of Flight in Seattle used to try to keep some of their planes in flyable condition, but as the Boeing retirees die off, that's become harder.
As a student, this simulator was just another piece of junk collecting dust at the Riverside campus at Texas A&M. The storage building itself was an old WWII hanger, and was mostly used by student groups for constructing design projects, with access to the adjacent (long-retired) runway space for testing.
The amount of legacy/surplus aerospace hardware stored in that hanger was overwhelming. I don't think I fully appreciated it at the time. Most of it is probably cleared out by now. Small world
> The internal illumination for all those switch panels was accomplished via 1,600 tiny incandescent bulbs that were soldered onto printed circuit boards on the backs of the panels.
That's a strange design decision given it'd be known that those incandescent bulbs would need regular replacement.
It's a shame they went with a static display rather then add a "ride" aspect. While some may argue this is a museum not a theme park, the more engaging it is the more people will visit and learn.
> It's a shame they went with a static display rather then add a "ride" aspect.
This simulator is over 50 years old; anyone actively using it, especially unsupervised, would cause damage.
I mean I'm all for someone building a newer and more resilient simulator, or reproducing it in VR, but at this point this is a genuine museum piece and the focus should be on conservation, not entertainment.
>This simulator is over 50 years old; anyone actively using it, especially unsupervised, would cause damage.
It's expensive and takes up a lot of space. Letting people use it, even if they can't truly "fly" it, is probably the best shot it has at having any staying power in its new home. Sure that'll probably require some motor, lightbulb and upholstery replacements over time but it should be fine as long as they stay on top of it.
When the museum comes under hard times a decade or more in the future, after the novelty has worn off, being a cost positive attraction vs a cost neutral use of space that could be used for something that can attract people is likely the difference between the simulator staying or going.
> This simulator is over 50 years old; anyone actively using it, especially unsupervised, would cause damage.
The Delta museum near the Atlanta airport has an old, full-motion, level D 737 flight simulator anyone can pay to "fly". A operator joins you in the simulator and sets up and operates the simulator for you. $425 gets you 45 minutes and it seems to stay relatively busy.
I would imagine the operator of a Space Shuttle simulator could charge quite a bit more for the opportunity to fly one of the most famous aircraft ever built.
It would be cheaper to pay someone like CAE to build a modern hardware space-shuttle simulator if you wanted rides. Then it would be easy to replace parts, since they actively maintain hundreds of aircraft simulators.
It wouldn't really have the reliability to be a ride.
Theme park rides are designed from scratch for high-uptime usage. Like real aircraft, something like this probably required several hours of maintenance for every hour of "flight-time" back in the day.
Just doing some quick back-of-the-napkin math, 1,600 miniature bayonet sockets potentially add up to hundreds of pounds of mass. That may have been a factor in the decision to solder the bulbs directly onto the boards. Especially when replacement probably required disassembling panels, so the soldering isn't really time worth saving. Just a guess though, and the significance varies quite a bit depending on where you set the slider for "mass of one socket." Still, it's the same order of magnitude that they shaved off when they decided not to paint the external tank, so it's plausible.
The simulator was designed in the days when white LEDs did not yet exist, and likely the time on display is well in excess of what it normally would have gone through when in use as a training device.
The only thing you would be using LEDs for in the late 70s would be indicator lights and 7-segment displays. The only colors available are red, green and yellow, and they wen't bright enough to illuminate dials, instrument panels or cockpits. Even if they did use LEDs where they made sense, they would still need hundreds of incandescent bulbs.
> LEDs were available at the time the shuttles were built
Assembly of Endeavour, the final STS to be built, was completed in 1990. Blue LEDs appeared in 1993 and white ones several years alter. During the shuttle era, LEDS were invariably red, green and yellow. I'd be surprised if those colours were considered suitable for general illumination of flight instrumentation.
They are also incredibly tolerant to current/voltage spikes because they are purely resistive, which makes them ideal for situations when power could be 'interesting' as they will still function unless they are run well beyond normal limits. So when it's more important that it just works, it's not a bad design.
Also soldering them would be least of the cost concerns for the shuttle program, which had much bigger and nastier cost centers.
Readit News
Maybe I'm weird, but the details of the computers and however they were producing the graphics with mid-70s technology is actually more interesting to me than the simulator itself.
Are they using computer graphics by that point? Or are they stuck with computer-controlled cameras over over physical models?
Edit: Found some high-level documentation of the whole computer systems[1]. Based on the description of the visual system on page 117, it looks like has specialised hardware for lit, flat-shaded polygonal graphics.
[1] https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1980NASCP2150..113O
With adequate documentation, they could be emulated, at least at the input/output level.
Would be fun then to add new missions to an old simulator :-)
IIRC, the original ones were not raster displays, but long-persistence X-Y displays.
While it's a imperfect preservation from a historical standpoint giving a lot of people the opportunity to experience it would help preserve it for the future.
Museums often struggle with this. Some historically interesting piece of whatever languishes and then eventually gets chucked whereas something that's more completely unremarkable and low value and common enough to let people actually interact with it winds up being the star of their collection.
> After the real work was done, they let me shoot a couple of approaches into Kennedy. It has an intuitive Heads Up Display, similar to what some 737s have. The control stick was quite unique however. It sits between your legs like a fighter jet and it's fly-by-wire with an unusual activation mechanism that I can't really describe. It was very sensitive so you have to make short inputs, almost flying it with just 2 fingers. It's just like flying an approach in an airplane except you were coming in at 250-300 kts most of the way, you were flying a 18.5 degree glide path (normal plane is 3 degrees), and there was no 2nd chance . The HUD guidance plus the approach lights at Kennedy made it very easy to fly an approach. I had no trouble landing safely, but it was nearly impossible to get a "greaser". I think I bounced one and floated one. I left Buidling 5 with the biggest grin on my face that day
- Gman737 - DEC 10, 2021 10:24 AM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/saving-the-shuttle-s...
Yeah, the Shuttle was such a bad glider that they trained pilots using a business jet with gear down and reverse thrust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Training_Aircraft
Keeping the cockpit lights on is about as far as it usually goes. The Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos has some aircraft where the cockpit lights are lit, but that's all. The Museum of Flight in Seattle used to try to keep some of their planes in flyable condition, but as the Boeing retirees die off, that's become harder.
As a student, this simulator was just another piece of junk collecting dust at the Riverside campus at Texas A&M. The storage building itself was an old WWII hanger, and was mostly used by student groups for constructing design projects, with access to the adjacent (long-retired) runway space for testing.
The amount of legacy/surplus aerospace hardware stored in that hanger was overwhelming. I don't think I fully appreciated it at the time. Most of it is probably cleared out by now. Small world
That's a strange design decision given it'd be known that those incandescent bulbs would need regular replacement.
It's a shame they went with a static display rather then add a "ride" aspect. While some may argue this is a museum not a theme park, the more engaging it is the more people will visit and learn.
This simulator is over 50 years old; anyone actively using it, especially unsupervised, would cause damage.
I mean I'm all for someone building a newer and more resilient simulator, or reproducing it in VR, but at this point this is a genuine museum piece and the focus should be on conservation, not entertainment.
It's expensive and takes up a lot of space. Letting people use it, even if they can't truly "fly" it, is probably the best shot it has at having any staying power in its new home. Sure that'll probably require some motor, lightbulb and upholstery replacements over time but it should be fine as long as they stay on top of it.
When the museum comes under hard times a decade or more in the future, after the novelty has worn off, being a cost positive attraction vs a cost neutral use of space that could be used for something that can attract people is likely the difference between the simulator staying or going.
The Delta museum near the Atlanta airport has an old, full-motion, level D 737 flight simulator anyone can pay to "fly". A operator joins you in the simulator and sets up and operates the simulator for you. $425 gets you 45 minutes and it seems to stay relatively busy.
I would imagine the operator of a Space Shuttle simulator could charge quite a bit more for the opportunity to fly one of the most famous aircraft ever built.
Theme park rides are designed from scratch for high-uptime usage. Like real aircraft, something like this probably required several hours of maintenance for every hour of "flight-time" back in the day.
Also, I'm bummed they replaced them because LEDs have a very different feel.
Assembly of Endeavour, the final STS to be built, was completed in 1990. Blue LEDs appeared in 1993 and white ones several years alter. During the shuttle era, LEDS were invariably red, green and yellow. I'd be surprised if those colours were considered suitable for general illumination of flight instrumentation.
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Also soldering them would be least of the cost concerns for the shuttle program, which had much bigger and nastier cost centers.