How does the shuttle communicate with mission control during launch, mission and landing?
Leinbach: Well, another good question about communications. On the ground, first of all, we communicate back through the control room to our Merritt Island Launch Area set-up which is a communications facility that we have here on Merritt Island near the Kennedy Space Center. On orbit, the S-band communications, which is the voice and the data communications, goes to our TDRS satellite — the tracking data relay satellite — that’s a NASA satellite. We have three of them in orbit so we can maintain almost continuous communications with the astronauts. So, that S-band data goes to TDRS and then down to the White Sands Space Harbor out in Mexico where it’s received on the ground and then distributed to the Johnson Space and the Kennedy Space Center. In addition, we have a KU-band antenna. That’s a high gain antenna for TV pictures, or other uses that have a wider bandwidth when more data needs to be transmitted, we use the KU-band. Likewise, that goes to the tracking data relay satellite
