Control rooms  |  2023-10-25

GESAB to Build Hyper-Customized Control Console for SpaceX

Source: The Critical Communications Review | Gert Jan Wolf editor

The GESAB team was commissioned to design a customized control console with SpaceX’s very specific technical and aesthetic needs.

GESAB has become a benchmark in the design of control consoles for the aerospace sector. After the success of the control consoles designed for NASA and Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), the company received an interesting project from the United States, which posed a challenge for the team, for another company in the aerospace sector: SpaceX.

The company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk is dedicated to the design, manufacture and launch of advanced rockets and spacecraft, and has the clear objective of revolutionizing the current aerospace sector. With its focus on the future, the company decided that the time had come to update the furniture in the control room from which launches are carried out.

For this reason, the GESAB team was commissioned to design a customized control console with SpaceX’s very specific technical and aesthetic needs. Thus, a meticulous and demanding work of study, design and adaptation to the company’s critical environment was carried out internally.

A great challenge for the design team

The proposed control console model was Advantis NG due to its power, connectivity and firmness. The task of hyper-customization of the console was very demanding, since SpaceX wanted it to follow its corporate aesthetic in addition to meeting the technical requirements. In this way, the entire lower structure was manufactured in black: the vertebral beam, the technical bucks and the side legs. In addition, the LED lights on the legs, usually white, were implemented in red and the company logo was included backlit, providing a much more corporate appearance.

But the customization was not only at the bottom, since the control console had to have an extreme curved shape. The envelope also included turrets, common in the sector, which facilitate the development of the operators’ activity.

The result of the design carried out by Gesab is a control console that is aesthetically very personalized to SpaceX’s demands.