This flight is planned for Tuesday 16th July and will commemorate the launch of Apollo 11 on this day in 1969, 50 years ago. I want to make it special, so the flight will have a few new things all designed to try and recapture the technology of the ’60s.

Payload

The primary payload is a Revell Apollo 11 kit, assembled in the configuration flown from the Earth to the Moon. For more details see my blog post on the build.

Mission Control

Mission Control was a central part of every NASA spaceflight, and everyone has seen the Apollo-era mission control room with its flickering monitors and flashing lights. I built an emulation of such a console as a web page back in my Telnet Flight a couple of years ago, so I decided to start with that and build a new web app for my Apollo flight. You can read about how this works in this blog post about the system.

The web app online here, and currently features:

  • YouTube streaming (from launch)
  • SSDV images from the primary tracker
  • Google map (not SNUS) with balloon, chase car and on-board landing prediction
  • 3D visualisation of the view from the payload
  • Raw data screen

Trackers

The current plan is for flight to carry 3 trackers:

  • Pi tracker with wide-angle camera sending telemetry and monochrome (of course!) SSDV (869MHz band).
  • Pi tracker telemetry only (434MHz band LoRa)
  • AVR tracker (434MHz band LoRa

Payload IDs and frequencies etc will be updated here when decided.

Streaming

The launch will be streamed over YouTube, viewable within the dashboard.

Receiving

I hope to have a lot of receivers for this flight. Now, because the dashboard works from a custom web server and not Habhub, you will need an up-to-date LoRa gateway to provide data for the dashboard. You will need V1.8.30 issued on 26th June, or later, and you need to add this line to gateway.txt:

EnableHABLink=Y

With that done, telemetry will up uploaded to the hab.link server, as well as Habitat if you have that enabled. SSDV is not affected and is sent to Habitat only.

One Reply to “Apollo 11 HAB Flight”

  1. Dave,

    This look absolutely brilliant, well done.
    Our library os celebrating Space Exploration at the moment so I will pass this on.

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