The Launch Control Center (LCC) is a four-story building located at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida used for the supervision of launches from Launch Complex 39. In practice, this means that the LCC handles all American manned space flights. Attached to the southeast corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building, the LCC contains offices; telemetry, tracking and instrumentation equipment; the automated Launch Processing System; and four firing rooms.
Launches have been conducted from the LCC since the unmanned Apollo 4 (Apollo-Saturn 501) launch on November 9, 1967; its first manned launch was Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968.
Read more about Launch Control Center: Firing Room
Famous quotes containing the words launch, control and/or center:
“Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron- clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
—Warren Beatty (b. 1937)