| NASA/Cal Tech Jet Propulsion Labs, Pasadena, California |
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| The beautiful JPL Cal Tech campus in the foothill just above Pasadena, California. This was a place dedicated to the exploration of outer space. |
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After the disasterous fire of Apollo 1 which took the lives of three astronauts that were to be launched in the first Apollo flight, Network people like myself in Houston had very little to do and we knew that it was going to take a year or more to fix the problems and redesign the Apollo module. I was asked to take a position with the NASA/Jet Propulsion Labs as the Assistant Division Head of the Systems Division, the largest division at the JPL, which had the respoinsibility for the DSN, the SFOF and the large computing center in Pasadena. It also was responsible for the large communications network that tied in their stations with the control center and computers. The JPL spacecraft which included the Ranger, Lunar Orbiters, Surveyors and many more were the eyes and ears setting the stage for manned exploration of the moon, and man's look into outer space.
I sold my cows, picked up my belongings and moved to Los Angeles to go to work at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I took with ma a whole team of people from Houston that were very knowledgeable about network requirements for manned flight, and they would be the link between the manned program requirements and the building of the capabilities of the JPL to support these requirements for deep space flight, first of all, going to the moon.
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| JPL Deep Space Network (DSN) stations located throughout the world to track and direct missions launched from Cape Canaveral with destinations in outer space. This DSL site is a Goldstone, CA. The stations tie backinto a major control center in Pasadena, the Space Flight Operations Facility (SFOF) |
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| The Mission Control Room at the JPL. |
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| The Ranger spacecraft designed to explore the moon. Designed in the early 1960's was one of the first of many deep space explorers that the JPL was reasponsible for, and now their numbers are hundreds, and they have explored many of the planets in the universe. |
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Before I had left NASA Manned Spacecraft Center and joined the ranks of the NASA JPL, I had an opportunity to begin working on a replacement system for the ground based radars and other electronic ground equipment that had been the mainstay of the programs up until that time. The idea was to develop a system that was airborne, hopefully in outer space, that could do the tracking and communications with the manned and unmanned spacecraft of the future.
JPL, NASA Houston and TRW Space Sytems in Redondo Beach, California began working on a system that was dubbed TDRSS for Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. When I went to the JPL, I continued this association. These satellites were to take the place of all the radars, telemetry, command and control communications on the ground.
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| The first generation of the TDRSS. It was going to make it possible for NASA to fly satellites, both manned and unmanned, into outer space, and not be restricted to line-of-sight that had been detrimental up to that time. |
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| Second generation TDRSS which has totally changed the control of spacecraft to outer space. |
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