Fixed display control rooms such as those originally developed from power stations and transit systems such as Bostons MBTA were ironically more impressive than NASA mission control.
control rooms of all types
A gallery of some of the most impressive control rooms, including the original NASA mission control, the Beatles’ recording studio, the NORAD nuclear war room, what is left of Chernobyl reactor 4 control and control rooms for TV, traffic, subways and particle accelerators.
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This is the mother of all control rooms, the room that landed men on the moon and guided them back safely, when disaster struck on Apollo 13. It is still preserved intact and is quite possibly Americas true spiritual nexus, secular one.
This is the control room inside reactor 4 at Chernobyl, where when this photo was taken in Nov 10 2000, radiation levels were still 16,000 times over the safe limit.
Traffic control centers - road traffic rather than air traffic that is, monitor highways with an army of cameras and relay congestion information to control centers such as this one n Tokyo, which is particularly impressive.
The real place for the setting of War Games is pretty banal looking compared to control rooms that are much less important.
What we cant glean from this site is if this control room is actually inside the enormous truck that provides the following:<p /><p />"This completely new production vehicle, the first native 720p & 1080i format truck in the world, was introduced to the broadcasting community to rave reviews. The unit is capable of providing 32 cameras, 30 VTR’s or channels of digital disk recording, has an audio control room capable of handling over 594 separate sources and boasts one of the largest production and routing switcher systems on the road anywhere in the world. All of this was accomplished in a single, 53-foot trailer that sets up quickly and easily with three engineers. In the short time that HD4 has been available, it has already provided services for The NBA Playoffs on ESPN, The NBA Finals on ABC, and along with the B unit and Location Solutions mobile edit facility, currently provides the production equipment for Monday Night Football."
The International Space Station has control centers in both the US and Russia. Shown here is the current Russian control center which is on the outskirts of Moscow.
When the Large Hadron Collider is switched on in July, at CERN, Femilab will no longer house the worlds largest particle accelerator, controlled from the room shown here.
This is the view inside a currently operating nuclear power station in the US.<p /><p />Interestingly, this Maryland Nuclear Power Station is one of the power plants that was to have supplied nuclear waste to the giant underground storage facility deep in Yucca mountain in the middle of the desert. Because of local opposition, spent nuclear fuel from places like this is in far less secure places.
The legendary Abbey Road, made famous by the Beatles, has three studios, the largest of which, is Studio 1.
This is the current Space Shuttle control room in Houston, where the original Apollo mission control center is still preserved.
CNN made the backdrop of the TV control room part of the overall drama of real time news, however we couldnt find a decent pic of CNN so you will have to do with the original masters of real time news, Reuters.
Given the size of the worlds largest experiment and the impressive engineering of the detectors at the CERN large hadron collider, the control room for the biggest experiment of them all is pretty much a let down. A shame, since they will have to do something to make it more exciting in movies.
