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Description of Driving Event:

When the mission control center was first activated in the early 1960s, it was considered a technical marvel. However, this original architecture has received only modest upgrades since the Apollo program days. Until recently, it maintained a single mainframe based architecture that displayed data and largely left the job of data analysis and trend determination to the flight controller teams monitoring the consoles. The display technology utilized in this system is monochrome and primarily displays text information. The job of turning data into information, upon which flight decisions could be made is performed by the controllers through interpretation of the incoming numeric data. In cases where it was determined that additional computational support was required, small off-line personal computers were added. The controllers manually copied data from the console display screens and entered it into the small computers to perform off-line analysis.

Although this system is technologically outdated, it contains years of customizing efforts and has served NASA well through space shuttle program missions to date. Several factors are now driving NASA to change the architecture of the mission control center operations. First, the primary reason seems to be to control costs. Second, automation available today can be used to expand the capabilities of controllers by eliminating some of the data reduction tasks they must perform and by increasing the amount of information they can utilize in making decisions. Third, the time required to obtain information for decision-making can be substantially reduced.