Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

Get in touch with technology, with tech stuff from how stuff works.

com. How Stuff works.com.

Hello again everyone.

Welcome to Tech Stuff.

My name is Chris Billett and I am an editor here at how stuff works.com sitting across from me

not in the Mission Control Center is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.

Ground control to Major Tom.

But that was a gimme.

Yeah, that was pretty easy.

Yeah, we're going to talk today about Mission Control Center with NASA, specifically

the Mission Control Center associated with Shuttle shuttle missions seeing as how the final space shuttle mission

launched well we're recording this podcast before the launch but it should publish after that launch

We wanted to kind of talk about the stuff that goes on on the ground, not necessarily the stuff that's going on inside the orbiter itself.

I said lunch, not launch.

See if you can identify that quote.

Yeah, we, when Jonathan and I were talking about doing the episode on the space shuttle.

As we do with some of the complex topics,

we decide to at least have an idea where we're

going to go with the research.

And even before we started doing the research, we figured that this was going to be complex enough that we would have to break it down.

And we decided to do an episode specifically on mission control because it's not just the astronauts inside the space shuttle who are paying attention

...