Guidance & Control Division, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) real-time visual systems history began with NASA-2, also known as the Electronic Scene Generator (ESG), developed between 1965 and 1967 under the leadership of Rod Rougelot and Robert A. Schumacker at General Electric. Built in Syracuse and installed in the Guidance & Control Simulation Laboratory at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), NASA-2 played a crucial role in Shuttle training by providing pilots with real-time, full-color images of runways, terrain, horizon cues, and docking targets through a collimated “infinity-optics” window on the Shuttle Cruise-and-Landing Simulator. This optical setup explains the circular vignette visible in historical photographs from the period.

NASA-2 was a major breakthrough in computer graphics, preceding the Utah frame-buffer and early SIGGRAPH demonstrations. The system’s hardware revolved around a Raytheon 520 host computer equipped with SM-32 sonic delay-line memory. The image generation was divided among three pipelined hardware modules—Edge, Surface, and Object generators—that worked together to produce composite video output. Lead engineer Robert A. Schumacker later recalled that the system also provided separate synchronized red, green, and blue signals. This advanced design enabled NASA-2 to redraw every element on screen 30 times per second, delivering smooth, real-time, and full-color “out-the-window” visuals unmatched for its time at NASA’s human spaceflight center in Houston, Texas.

Beyond its technical achievements, the imagery produced by NASA-2 represents a key moment in the emergence of computer graphics as an art form. The early frames it generated reveal minimalist landscapes and floating geometric shapes that resonate with the hard-edge abstraction and systems art movements of the 1960s. As some of the earliest surviving color-pixel images, the work of NASA-2 captures the moment when algorithms transitioned from raw computation to a new visual language, laying foundation for both computer art and real-time simulation.