Locally based spaceflight company unveils its mission control center
The new Intuitive Machines mission control center will resume a long-held Houston tradition: Guiding landers to the surface of the moon.
And while its landers won’t be carrying people, the company’s missions will still be historic.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines will be one of the first companies to own and operate a lunar lander. It’s delivering commercial cargo and NASA-provided payloads to the moon this year, and it will carry a NASA ice-mining experiment to the moon as soon as next year.
To build its control center, called Nova Control, Intuitive Machines hired an expert from NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
“I was super excited at the opportunity to create a control center from scratch,” said Troy LeBlanc, the vice president of control centers for Intuitive Machines.
LeBlanc previously used NASA’s mission control as a flight controller. He also worked on the actual hardware and software used to run mission control, and he led efforts to modernize and upgrade the agency’s systems.
Right before leaving NASA, LeBlanc helped renovate and restore the Apollo Mission Control Center. He got a chance to work
with flight controllers and directors who put men on the moon.
All of this knowledge was used to build Nova Control, and he made some adjustments to NASA’s approach.
At NASA, flight controllers sit in a theater-like setup, with their desks in rows that face a large monitor at the front of the room. Intuitive Machines designed its mission control in a circular configuration. Its mission controllers sit at computers facing the circle’s outside. In the center of the circle is a table, and the controllers can swivel their chairs toward the table for easy collaboration.
Some of these mission controllers will not be needed after the lander reaches the moon’s surface. So they can leave and create open seats for people monitoring the lander’s payloads. This, too, is designed to boost collaboration. At NASA, people associated with payloads often sit in another room or at another NASA facility, LeBlanc said.
But for those unable to travel to Houston, Intuitive Machines is using the cloud to help payload operators access data from their own offices. A copy of its control system is stored in the cloud, where it can be easily accessed from anywhere.
“I always hoped that I would be part of NASA when a crewed mission put astronauts back on the moon,” LeBlanc said. “But this opportunity to work on an uncrewed lander came up at a great time for me to make a change of career and be participating in a historic return to the surface, even if it’s an uncrewed system.”