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Building an Apollo Simulator
For two years, I’ve been working to program and build a complete Apollo space flight simulator to use in my physics classes. When I say “complete,” I mean not just a computer program that lets you fly, but a mock-up of the spacecraft control panels and the entire Mission Control, as well.
I’m a physicist, and I do a lot of computer programming in my research, so I started with writing a Python language program to handle the physics of space flight. The basic idea is that, given a starting position and speed, you add up the forces acting on the spacecraft (gravity, atmospheric drag, engines), and from that you get the acceleration. That gives you, in turn, the new position and speed. Step the clock forward a fraction of a second, and repeat. I have a lot of computer engineering students in my class, so it fit naturally with the lessons.
I was able to write the main program by myself, but I wanted more than just a few numbers dancing around my laptop screen, accurate though they may be. I needed a view out the window, switches to control the spacecraft, and terminals for the flight controllers down in “Houston” to watch the telemetry. The graphics and networking were something I’d never done before, so I hired one of my students to handle all of this.
The view from the astronauts’ seats.
For the spacecraft, I built a control panel out of whiteboard panel and borrowed toggle switches and lights from the Engineering Department for the most basic flight controls: abort, engine, parachutes, attitude, and stage separation. They gave me an Arduino microcontroller to connect them to the simulator (more programming for my student). My student set up graphics for the earth, moon, and stars, so the astronauts would have a view out the window, and he put in a display for the Apollo Guidance Computer. Finally, I printed out a full-sized poster of the actual Command Module control panel to give them more sense of being in and surrounded by the spacecraft.
Mission Control was easier, in a lot of ways. The flight controllers only need to look at telemetry—numbers and plots—no fancy graphics, but we had to figure out how to send all of that from my laptop, over the network, and get it to display, live.
The last component was the Mission Planning and Analysis Division, who works out the orbits and the plans for maneuvers, to get the crew out to the Moon and back. That meant a few more programs from me that would let the students design the orbit, and I had to test it out myself to make sure I could put the whole flight together.
Finally, I had to write up manuals and procedures for everybody. The astronauts needed to know how to handle maneuvers and reentry. The flight controllers had to know what problems to look for and when to call an abort.
I had originally planned to have it ready for next summer, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. But I started to realize that it was coming together faster than I expected, so I pushed the date up and committed to having the class carry out a round-the-moon flight (a recreation of Apollo 8, without any landing) this semester. Last month, I finally had it ready to go, and we had a launch.
View of Mission Control
I split the class into two teams, Red and White, who would take separate shifts and assigned each of the students to a role I thought they were well fitted for. Astronauts and the Flight Dynamics Officer (FIDO) had pretty hefty duties, so those went to some of the best students. CAPCOM (capsule communicator, the only one to speak directly to the crew) went to the chattier students. Others were more flexible in the assignments. In the view here, Red CAPCOM is talking through a walkie-talkie app to the astronauts.
My Mission Control security badge
You might see green badges on the students’ shirts. I made a fair imitation of the original Mission Control badges using Powerpoint, typed their names on them with my manual typewriter, and laminated them.
So how did it go? Pretty well, considering it was our test flight. A real crowd turned up to watch us. We had two launches and two reentries. The first launch went smoothly, mostly because of the bug that kept me from creating the engine failure I was trying to slip them. The second time, I gave them one engine failure on the second stage. The Booster Systems Engineer caught it and said we could continue on the other four engines. Then I made a second one fail, and he correctly called an abort. This caused some excitement, and I could hear the astronauts (in the same room with us for practice runs) frantically hitting the abort switch.
The first reentry had a real—and unplanned—switch failure that made the crew skip out of the atmosphere, because they couldn’t roll the spacecraft into the correct orientation. The second reentry was very smooth. As they entered the radio blackout (I’ve made the simulation stop sending data to Mission Control as long as it lasts), we heard a phone buzz. It was a telemarketer calling up one of the astronauts! That relieved some tension in the room, as people started joking about it. I remarked how impressed I was that they’d gotten the call through the ionization blackout. Perhaps we should hire them to handle communications. Finally, the crew opened their parachutes and splashed down gently in the Pacific Ocean.
Everybody had a great day, even though we didn’t wind up with enough time for the actual flight around the Moon. So I’m starting up a Spaceflight Club to give us more chance to practice the flights and carry out a full mission. I’m getting Engineering to machine a full-scale, realistic control panel. I’ll have all of the dials and switches of the real spacecraft, and it will be painted up to look like the original. By this coming summer, this is going to be pretty fantastic.
Published in Education
Ab-so-lute-ly! I’ve got similar criticisms of the fad running around some physics professors that students should “discover” the laws of physics on their own. You as the professor shouldn’t stand up at the chalk board and be the “sage on the stage.” No, you should be simply “facilitating” them as they stumble around, trying to get the experimental apparatus to do something. The idea seems to be that they’ll learn it more by doing it.
Well, sure, a lab every few days is a good way to try out the applications of what they’ve derived and see how to put it into practice. But introductory physics covers about 300 years worth of knowledge, from Galileo up through the end of the 19th century. It took the best minds in the history of the science three centuries to figure this stuff out in the first place, and the education theorists think that a bunch of freshman can do the same in 28 weeks? The only way to get all of that knowledge to them in a reasonable time is by lecturing and deriving it, and you take enough time out for labs to drive home the point more thoroughly.
Back to the learning-should-be-fun idea: You get that in almost every TV show or movie about a teacher. The protagonist is always the young guy, shaking things up from the fuddy-duddy old guard by having the kids go out and play, making minuscule applications of something he told them, and supposedly they’re going to have everything memorized and understood deeply this way? My friends in Organic Chemistry would pace the halls at night, trying to memorize their mnemonics for remembering the chemicals. Learning takes work, just like you said.
So, anyway, yes! I could squeeze in just one day for this project in class, and that was pushing it. I prepared the kids for it for a week with the lectures, and they had to read the instruction manuals for several days. But I hope the excitement of putting it together motivated them.
It sounds like you have the balance just right. When I was teaching I did not, especially at first.
Schools of Education were pushing this type of inductive learning back in the 60s at least. In our Teaching of Math class I was singled out for praise as the one person who “got it” and showed how to implement it. It gets to be an ideology, though. I took it to extremes at first. I noticed in the following decades that this kind of philosophy of learning was being pushed and advocated high and low (and maybe it still is) but that there were a lot of teachers who in practice were a lot better than their ideology. Good thing.
Now that’s a serious simulation! The one time I got down to Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch, the wind was 2-3 knots too strong for seven hours before they called it. We sat parked in a swamp where the mosquitoes were completely undeterred by the winds.
Very hardcore. Well done, sir.
But maybe not so much, if they were really using TV screens to show pictures that came from elsewhere.
Really? Are they expected to simultaneously discover calculus to do so?
Argh but this is just more of the poison of Rousseau. The problem is that you cannot ever assume tabula-rasa with kids – they’re mentally in no position to discover such laws because they’re carrying too many existing suppositions, biases, and prior knowledge.
Fantastic project. Congratulations.
Looking at the picture, I had the same thought when a friend sat me down in the Space Shuttle simulator in Houston: “Where do I put the quarter?”
Another Space Camp Alum here – Adult Space Academy level I (the weekend program) in July 1992, Adult Space Academy II (The weeklong program) in November of 1992 and December of 1993. I’ve also taken both of my boys to Family Space Camp as soon as each was old enough, in 2014 and just this past summer.
It was a blast being in the simulators (especially on the 24-hour missions), but in many ways it was more fun being on the Tiger team in Mission Control, digging through the manuals trying to solve the problems the sims were throwing at us.
What you are doing is so cool!
If in an official committee setting you challenge a teacher or administrator who is into this fad you may hear the response, “Studies show that students learn best this way…”
I have sometimes dug into the studies that are cited to back up educational fads that are the basis for concrete changes being proposed in our schools. Usually those studies are based on very limited criteria and are of limited applicability. Sometimes they are self-studies done by schools that have adopted new programs. These before-and-after studies tend to be the ones cited by promoters of the fads. There are better studies, too, covering a wide cross-section of schools and programs, done by relatively independent 3rd parties. Cite those studies in your committee gatherings, and the success stories (self-studies) get thrown back at you, so you have to be prepared.
Despite the fact that some studies are better than others, I have never run into one that discussed efficiency – showing that X is the best way to learn the most during the limited time that children are children, and within the limitations of a typical school budget for teachers and staff. I’m not saying there are no such studies, but I have not run into one in my limited forays into the subject. I suspect the attitude lurking in the background is that if everyone agreed that the new fad is best, taxpayers will come up with the resources to do it. But resources are always limited, and it is really difficult to expand the number of years of childhood in a healthy way.
I think you are right that this is the poison of Rousseau, but if you start spouting off about Rousseau at a school meeting, I suspect that would make it even easier for people to ignore you. (I never got that far myself.) Never underestimate the unthinking force behind a fad, never mind that this one has been going on almost since Rousseau. When you’re asked to serve on a committee, it’s not because administrators want you to help them rethink educational philosophy. You may be an known and outspoken opponent of some of the fads, and committee participation is a way to co-opt you for political purposes.
This reminds me that earlier this year I had the idea of writing a post called, “The Education of Ottilie Schmidt.” Ottilie was my great-aunt– a memorable character and a cat lady when she was old. My post would touch on some of the Rousseau-an fads coming to kindergartens in rural America in the 1890s. They weren’t all bad, especially at the kindergarten level.
Tim, it sounds fantastic already. You need to sell adults tickets to come give it a try, because I’m sure many would. Fund the whole thing with your own space camp. Good, good stuff.
I’d like to see a Communications Studies professor create a working simulator of the NASA public relations office.
;-)
They’ve tried that, and it resulted in incurable madness.
I have an old and dear friend who was second in command at the NASA PR office during the Apollo years. Thanks to Jim, I got a press pass to watch Apollo 14 take off, which was… well, there will never be anything like a Saturn V again.
Jim and I used to talk regularly, and he would rail about the corrupting influence of “advocacy journalism.” One of many things he was all too correct about.
That’s a good thing to rail against.
That’s just awesome.
Coolest. Teacher. EVER.
Yesterday’s XKCD
Hey, Richard—sorry, I missed your comment the other day. I had only recently learned that about the flight controllers’ screens, myself. I was surprised! Sy Liebergot (the EECOM who was critical on the Apollo 13 accident) took Ars Technica on a tour of Mission Control and explained to them how it all worked. That’s where I picked it up. Can you believe that even the column headings on the data tables weren’t computer generated? They were printed on pre-made slides, inserted over the computer screen, and then the composite picture was captured by the TV camera!
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn’t thought of that, and I believe now that I will. I have visited the site several times when looking for some obscure details about hardware, and I noticed Sy Liebergot adding comments there. That would be a good place to start getting the word out and ask for advice on displays and switches and the like.
Oh, but we’d already thought of that. We have a good engineering & computer science department, and I’ve been going to them a lot for advice on this project. We figured we could hook up the screens (or replace them if they’re broken) to a computer to generate realistic-looking data. Have the switches and warning lights connected and functional, etc.
Of course, since we didn’t get it…
Right! Right, right, right, right, right! Physics has a high threshold to overcome. Mostly it’s the math, but as my late colleague noted, kids don’t have classical, Newtonian presuppositions; they’re naturally Aristotelian! We have to spend a lot of time overcoming those preconceptions. Demonstrations (5 minutes?) are great for this, but if they’re expected to spend a 3-hour lab “discovering” it on their own, we’ll never have the time to go farther.
Furthermore, laboratory experiments in physics are notorious for not working quite the way you want them to. Friction, air resistance, random motions, and so on. All of those make it difficult to get the answer you expect from the idealized model. Conversely, starting only with the real-world equipment and trying to discover the idealized model is very tough, because you have to know how to strip away all of those complications. As I noted, it took the greatest minds 300 years to get from Galileo’s demonstration at the leaning tower of Pisa (disproving Aristotle’s law of falling bodies) to the end of the Classical Physics era in 1900 (Planck’s discovery of photons). That’s in large part because separating the consistent behavior from the “noise” and figuring out the underlying laws and what it all means is often hard work!
That would be hilarious!
I have toyed with the idea of having a knowledgeable professor act as our PAO (Public Affairs Officer) during the launch and reentry. That’s the guy who calls out the information over the PA system to the public, like “T-6…ignition sequence start…”
It has to be someone who knows the information (well, I’d have a script) and has a good public speaking voice. These guys are now across the hall from my office. Maybe I can rope one into doing it next flight.
[Gives salute] I found the Space Camp Alumni page on Facebook a couple of years ago and have gotten to talk to two of the campers I was there with. There’s an advisory board, and they take applications for alumni to serve a 1-year term. I’ve thought about doing that.
When I was there in ’86, we just had…what, 4-hour missions? I remember reading in the newsletter when the 24-hour missions started, and that sounded fantastic. My younger daughter enjoys all of this (or she at least humors me). She’s in middle school now, and when she gets to high school, I’m hoping to send her there. We’ve been listening to Gene Kranz’s Failure Is Not An Option as a book on tape in the car, and she was asking me last night which role I’d prefer in Mission Control. She would like to be CAPCOM, since they get to talk to the crew.
One thing I need to work out in more detail is not just how to throw failures at the team but how to give the team options to fix them. I need to program systems beneath the systems and teach them how to work around problems. That’s what will make Mission Control an exciting job in the Spaceflight Club.
Hah! I saw that because Tory Bruno, head of United Launch Alliance, tweeted it out with a funny comment yesterday:
They were just experimenting with 24 hour missions when I was there in ’92. It was a standard launch shuttle to space station, swap crews and return, just stretched out. They broke it into four 6-hour shifts, where everyone got one shift off to sleep. Lucky me, I pulled first shift off, and there was no way I was going to sleep at 8 AM when they were doing the launch, so I was up for the whole 24 hours. Better approach would have been to do 12 hours, freeze everything for everyone to sleep at once, then pick it back up again.
Things got a little sketchy around 2 or 3 am when people were getting tired and the problems kept pouring in. I was station commander for the first twelve, shuttle pilot for second twelve. We had a great group with several engineers (a couple that worked at Bell Labs), and the sims were throwing lots of issues at us. I was having a blast, but a couple of our crew members got pretty frustrated, probably due as much to lack of sleep as anything else.
Very realistic, then. I’m listening to Failure Is Not An Option, and the odd hours and lack of sleep take a toll on the real astronauts and mission controllers, too.
I might have to do the Space Camp family camp. I was only a Mission Specialist (flight day) and experiment P.I. (ground day) when I was there. Now, I bet I would do much better on the placement quiz!
I meant to ell you of some of my team’s misadventures, like how one flight was killed by ghosts. I can’t remember if I was on ground or flight that day. But anyway, two mission specialists went out for their EVA but depressurized the airlock before suiting up. So they were dead but didn’t know it yet.
While they were out, the rest of the crew were going through the reentry checklist. One item was to make sure the payload bay doors were closed and locked, or they’d fling open on reentry, make you tumble out of control, and kill you. The trick was, they had a 3-way toggle switch. Down was locked, up was unlocked, and middle…well, the middle didn’t do anything. Simulation Director had warned us to check that they’re down and not in the middle.
The crew closes and locks them properly. Then the dead spacewalkers come back in. One of them checks over the payload bay doors and for whatever reason puts them into the middle position. Orbiter breaks up on reentry.
We argued with the Simulation Director that since the one who’d done it was already dead from depressurization, that he couldn’t have unlocked the doors and killed us. But we lost the argument. ;)
Family camp is pretty lightweight – good for younger kids and/or first-timers, but if you’ve been before you won’t see much that’s new. I mean, I still enjoyed it, but it pales after you’ve done the weeklong program, even with a 25-year gap.
I don’t know if they still do the weeklong adult program or not. The biggest problem they have generally right now is the lack of a real manned program to emulate. They’re still doing some shuttle simulations, and we also ran an Orion mission when we there this summer.
I did the weeklong program twice so I could do two different tracks – first time I was on the Aviation track (shuttle pilot/commander emphasis). Second time I dragged a buddy along and he did aviation while I did one of the tracks where you get to do the mission specialist stuff, and go into the water tank for zero-G work.
Edit: and of course in both tracks you still spend time in MOCR too.
Looks like they only do the weekend adult program anymore, not the seven day. Too bad.
https://www.spacecamp.com/space/adult
Me at graduation, shortly after the end of the 24-hour mission. Looking at little peaked. And I still had an 11-hour drive home in front of me.
Flight deck during the mission
MOCR (this was during one of the two hour missions)
Sorry, didn’t mean to thread-jack you.
But let me know when I can come run an Apollo mission in your simulator.