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The Bigelow Aerospace Mission Control Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, monitors and operates the company's spacecraft currently in orbit and will control BA's future space facilities. Mission controllers sit at various multi-monitor consoles below two large video walls that show telemetry, spacecraft position, orbital pass times and photos returned from the spacecraft.
Data and imagery are transmitted into Mission Control from the two Bigelow Aerospace spacecraft currently orbiting the Earth - Genesis I and Genesis II. Communications take place when either spacecraft makes a "pass" over any of BA's four ground stations - positioned strategically around North America - in Na'alehu, Hawaii, North Pole, Alaska, Las Vegas, Nevada, and the former site of Loring Air Force Base near Limestone, Maine.
Unlike NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, BA's Mission Control consists of a small team of engineers with various backgrounds that are each responsible for the broad operation of all systems on each vehicle. Each controller is responsible for vehicle command and control, data acquisition, vision/imagery operations, ground station operations, and the development and testing of future BA modules, among other duties.
The BA Mission Control Center may be manned at any given time, 24 hours a day, based on the window of time that each spacecraft's orbit brings it within sight of any of the four ground stations.
As Bigelow Aerospace progresses from operating the unmanned prototype Genesis spacecraft to larger, manned space facilities, Mission Control will transition and grow to include system specific operators providing around-the-clock on-console support.
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