Space Center Houston

apollo mission control tour nasa

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as wait time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

lreynolds04

Also popular with travelers

apollo mission control tour nasa

Space Center Houston - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (with Photos)

  • Space Center Houston Admission Ticket (From $32.63)
  • NASA's Space Center Admission Plus Houston City Tour (From $98.95)
  • Houston CityPASS (From $68.00)
  • Private Houston City Tour Including NASA Space Center Admission (From $85.00)
  • 3D Printer Factory Tour plus 2 ft Tall Rocket! (From $30.77)
  • (0.26 mi) Extended Stay America - Houston - NASA - Johnson Space Center
  • (0.28 mi) Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham Houston
  • (0.43 mi) Courtyard By Marriott Houston Nasa/clear Lake
  • (0.77 mi) Super 8 by Wyndham Houston/Webster/NASA
  • (0.37 mi) Brentwood Inn
  • (0.15 mi) Starport Cafe - NASA's Johnson Space Center's Cafeteria
  • (0.20 mi) Himalayan Taj
  • (0.28 mi) Burger Nation
  • (0.28 mi) Bon Appetit Cafe
  • (0.25 mi) Luby's Cafeteria NASA Rd
  • (0.44 mi) The Paint Pub
  • (3.73 mi) Sailaway Clear Lake Charters
  • (0.56 mi) Jet Ski Houston
  • (0.56 mi) 365 Lash.Spa
  • (0.64 mi) Scout Bar

Space Center Houston Information

Finding the Universe

Travel tales, photography and a dash of humor

Space Center Houston Tram Tour Apollo V

Guide to Visiting Space Center Houston, Texas

Last updated: December 16, 2023 . Written by Laurence Norah - 8 Comments

If you are visiting Houston in Texas, one attraction we can highly recommend you spend some time at is the Space Center Houston.

Space Center Houston is the official visitor center of the NASA Johnson Space Center, which is the home of NASA’s Mission Control and where U.S. astronauts are trained. It’s also a Smithsonian affiliate museum.

There are two main parts to a visit to the Space Center. There’s the large self-guided Space Center museum itself, which is home to numerous exhibits on space exploration and space in general.

Then there’s the tram tour, which takes you onto the grounds of the NASA Johnson Space Center facility itself, where you can see actual working government facilities, as well as historic locations like the original Mission Control room.

In this post, we’re going to share everything you need to know to make the most out of your visit to Space Center Houston, from getting there, to what to see and do, to how to save money on your ticket.

Let’s get started.

A Guide to Visiting Space Center Houston

Where is space center houston.

Space Center Houston is at 1601 E NASA Parkway. This is found around 26 miles southeast of the city center, or approximately a 30-minute drive in light traffic.

How To Get to Space Center Houston?

From Houston, the easiest way to get to Space Center Houston is to drive. You can just follow the I-45 out of the city centre, and then take exit 24, following signs for NASA. It should take around half an hour, although of course traffic can slow you down. There is a large car-parking lot on site, with a reasonable daily fee of $5 per vehicle.

During the week it is also possible to take public transport to Space Center Houston, using Bus service 249. This takes around an hour and costs $3. You can see schedules and timetables on the Houston Metro site . Public transport is not available on the weekends.

There is a Hop-on Hop-off bus service in Houston , but it does not go to the Space Center.

You can also take a taxi or ride share service like Uber. Prices will vary, but will be in the region of $30 – $60 each way depending on traffic and time of day. You can also get these back from the Space Center.

Finally, it’s also possible to take a guided tour from the city centre out to Space Center Houston. As an example, this tour includes a tour of Houston, transport to and from Space Center Houston, as well as entry to the Space Center.

Starship Gallery

How Much Does it Cost to Visit Space Center Houston?

Standard entry to Space Center Houston for an adult (12+) is $29.95 – $34.95 depending on the day and time you visit. It’s $24.95 for children (aged 4-11) and $27.95 for seniors (65+). Prices are correct as of February 2023.

There are a variety of discounts available for active and retired military with I.D., AAA members with I.D., and groups. Children 3 and under are able to enter for free.

You can see all the details of the pricing and discount eligibility on the official site here . Note, tickets bought on the official site are non-refundable. You can also buy your ticket online in advance here for the same price , with the option of free cancellation up to 24 hours in advance of your visit.

You can also buy tickets in person. The price is the same, but if you print your ticket at home or download it to your mobile device, then you can skip the ticket line and go straight to the entry turnstile. This can save you a bit of time on busy days.

Space Center Houston is also included on the Houston City PASS . This can save you significant money if you plan on visiting some of the other attractions that the pass covers – up to 50% savings in fact! We found the pass very useful for our trip to Houston.

The Houston City PASS includes entry to five of Houston’s most popular attractions, but you only need to visit two or three of them for it to start saving you money.

See what it covers and buy yours in advance here . You can also buy it here with the option to cancel up to 24 hours before your trip if you need the flexibility.

Note – the CityPASS includes the standard tram tours but not the Mission Control tram tour, which is a paid extra. Last time we checked in 2023, you can upgrade on site for $15, subject to availability.

Space Vehicle Mockup Facility

Are there different ticket types and experiences at the Space Center?

There are a number of different ticket options for Space Center. These are:

  • the standard ticket
  • the standard ticket with Mission Control Tour
  • the Breakfast with an Astronaut Experience
  • the VIP tour

The difference between these tours is reflected in the experience you have as well as the price you pay. See below for more on what each of these tickets includes and the difference between them, as well ar pricing.

Ticket types for Space Center Houston

The standard entry ticket gets you access to all the exhibits in the Space Center as well as the tram tour of NASA Johnson Space Center. This is the ticket included on the Houston City PASS . This costs $29.95 – $34.95 for an adult.

The standard entry ticket with Mission control tour . This is the same as the standard entry ticket but it also includes the Mission control tram tour. This costs an extra $15 per ticket, so for adults it varies from $44.95 – $49.95.

The breakfast with an astronaut experience. This includes your standard entry, plus, as the name suggests, you get to have a meal with an astronaut. You’ll hear stories and anecdotes from an actual NASA astronaut, plus have the opportunity to take photos.

This is only available once or twice a week, and it depends on astronaut availability. This experience needs to be booked in advance, and you can find out more here about availability and what it includes. It currently costs $99.95.

Finally, the NASA VIP Space Center Houston tour is the ultimate VIP experience, for those who want a truly unique and special experience. The highlight of this experience is a 3 hour guided tour of the NASA Johnson Space Center, giving you much more access than the tram tour.

The VIP costs $199.95, and the includes your entry to Space Centre Houston, so you have plenty of time to see everything. The tour needs to be booked in advance, which you can do here . It is only available for those aged 14 and older. Tours run twice a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They actually visit different locations, so you could book both for the ultimate experience!

Experiences at Space Center Houston

As well as the different ticket options, Space Center Houston also offers a variety of educational programs geared to families and children’s organizations and groups (e.g., Boy Scouts, school groups).

For example, they offer a number of overnight experiences, including a family oriented overnight experience. This gives you the opportunity to actually stay overnight at the facility, either in your own tent outside, or inside amongst the artefacts.

You can see all the upcoming events and experiences on the events page here .

Space Center Houston International Space Station Gallery

What can you do at Space Center Houston?

There is a lot to do at Space Center Houston, with over 400 space artifacts, a number of permanent and temporary exhibitions, learning experiences, theaters, and more!

Here’s a quick overview of the major attractions and activities you can enjoy at Space Center Houston. It’s not absolutely everything, but it should give you an idea of the scope of what’s on offer!

The NASA Tram Tour at Space Center Houston

This tour of the NASA Johnson Space Center takes you to some of the highlights of the Johnson Space Center, and is one of the most popular parts of a visit to the Space Center.

The tour may change depending on what’s happening at the facility and security considerations with active missions and programmes, but it normally has the option to visit one or more of the following, depending on the time of year and tram tour chosen:

  • The Mission Operations Control Room 2, commonly known as Mission Control, which was where the Apollo missions were coordinated from.
  • The Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, where astronauts train on replicas of space vehicles like the ISS.
  • Rocket Park, home to a Saturn V rocket (the size has to be seen to be believed) as well as a number of other rockets from different stages of the space program.

We have more detail on the tram tour in the section dedicated to taking the tram tour elsewhere in this guide.

Space Vehicle Mockup Facility

Independence Plaza

Independence Plaza is a large space outside the main Space Center building. It is home to an actual Boeing 747 aircraft, atop which is mounted a replica space shuttle.

The 747 in question was one of two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft developed by NASA to transport the space shuttle from it secondary landing site back to the main Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center.

Often, bad weather would prevent the shuttle from landing at Kennedy, and so the 747 was developed to transport it back.

At Independence Plaza you can go all the way up into the replica shuttle, as well as through the length of the 747, where there are a variety of exhibits and interactive installations, telling the story of the vehicle.

Starship Gallery

Inside the main Space Center building, one of the most impressive galleries in our opinion is the Starship Gallery.

This is home to three actual spacecraft which have flown to space, the Mercury 9 capsule, the Gemini 5 capsule, and the Apollo 17 command module.

There’s also a lunar module test vehicle, a lunar rover test vehicle, a full-scale Skylab trainer and more.

Finally, the Starship Gallery is home to an actual piece of lunar rock, which is one of only eight in the world that you are allowed to touch. Yes, you can touch a piece of the moon in the Starship Gallery!

Mission Mars

One of the newest exhibits at the Space Center is Mission Mars. This exhibit focuses on NASA’s project to ultimately send manned space missions to Mars.

It covers the various challenges that need to be overcome for that to be successful, the vehicles that are being developed to take us there, and an overview of humanity’s relationship with the red planet.

There are also galleries explaining what life on Mars might be like when we finally send people there, including the habitats, clothing, and equipment that might be used.

This is a very interactive exhibit, with lots of touchscreens and hands on opportunities. You can also touch a Mars meteorite here.

Astronaut Gallery

The astronaut gallery is a display of astronaut clothing and spacesuits that have been on real-life missions.

Some of the highlights of this gallery include Pete Conrad’s Apollo 12 suit, Michael Collins’ Apollo 11 garment, and Wally Schrira’s Apollo 7 suit.

However, there are a great many wonderful exhibits here, spanning all of NASA’s space flight programmes. There is also the crew wall, which features portraits of every NASA astronaut who has flown in space, from Alan Shepherd and Neil Armstrong up to those currently in orbit on the International Space Station.

Space Center Houston Tram Tour Mission Control

International Space Station Gallery

The International Space Station (ISS) is one of mankind’s most impressive space achievements. This massive science laboratory, which orbits the earth at over 17,000 miles per hour, is the largest structure ever built in space. It is home to astronauts from all over the world.

The ISS gallery is designed to give you a sense of what life on the ISS is like, as well as to give an insight into the sort of research and experiments that take place on the ISS.

There’s also a live daily interactive show, Living in Space, which uses the latest projection mapping technology to explain what day to day life on the ISS is like. This usually takes place 3 – 4 times a day, and you can find out showtimes for the day of your visit from the Guest Services Desk on site.

There are two main theatres at the Space Center, the Destiny Theater and the Space Center Theatre.

The Destiny Theater shows the “Human Destiny” film, which uses NASA archival footage to tell the story of how NASA was formed, followed by the story of key NASA events and accomplishments. This is around 15 minutes in duration, and plays throughout the day continuously.

This theater is also home to the lectern used by US President John F. Kennedy when he gave his seminal speech announcing his intention to land an American on the moon.

The Space Center Theater is a state of the art 4K theater, and at time of writing, is the largest 4K theater in Texas. This plays a variety of space related films, documentaries, and animations.

The best way to see what is showing in the Space Center Theater when you visit is to download the official Space Center Houston app . You can also check with the Guest Services desk when you arrive for showtimes.

Entry to both theaters is included with your standard admission ticket.

Mission Briefing Center

If you want to know what’s happening in the world of space exploration right now, you’ll want to head to the Mission Briefing Center.

Here, there are daily presentations on current NASA missions, with real-time updates on progress and events, both in space and on earth.

This is a wonderful way to find out what’s happening right now in NASA, plus the live briefing finishes with a Q&A with the mission briefing officer, so you can ask your own questions and find out about the things that really interest you.

The content of the briefings changes, but they usually run three times a day and last for 30 minutes. Times for the briefings are displayed at the entrance to the Mission Briefing Center, as well as on the daily schedule in the map and guide you will receive. You can also ask at Guest Services for timings.

Ah yes, the gift shops! You definitely don’t want to leave the Space Center without picking up some sort of memorabilia of your trip, be that a t-shirt, a toy, or some astronaut ice cream.

There’s one major gift shop at the Space Center, as well as a smaller gift shop near the tram departure area. We noticed that these do carry slightly different items, so do check both of them.

One tip – don’t leave your shopping until the last minute. A lot of people do this, as we did, and there tends to be a mad rush for the tills right at the end of the day. So perhaps head over to the gift shop at least an hour before closing so you can browse and check out at a more leisurely pace.

Mission Mars

That’s just some of what is on offer at the Space Center Houston. As well as all the above, there are also regularly changing and updated temporary exhibits. So you definitely won’t run out of fun things to see and do!

How Long do you Need at Space Center Houston?

As you can see from all the things to do at Space Center Houston, you could easily spend a full day here.

We would suggest spending a minimum of 3 – 4 hours here, which will give you time to see some of the highlights and take a tram tour.

However, ideally you would plan to spend the full day here so as to have time to see and do everything without feeling rushed.

There’s a huge amount to see and do, especially when you consider the tram tour,  films, interactive exhibits, and so on, and you should make the most of your ticket.

Do you Need to do the Tram Tour at Space Center Houston?

The tram tour at Space Center Houston is not mandatory and you can spend your time just exploring the museum.

However, if you have not visited the Space Center before and taken the tram tour, we would definitely recommend doing it as it is one of the highlights of the experience.

There are three options for the tram tour, depending on your interest. Two of these are included on your entry ticket whilst the third requires an additional fee payable when you book.

The tram tours are as follows:

  • George W.S. Abbey Rocket Park Tour. Visits the Rocket Park where the Saturn V rocket can be found. Included on general admission, requires boarding pass (book on arrival with staff members at Guest Services Desk or with free app ).
  • Astronaut Training Facility Tour. As well as Rocket Park, this tour also visits the Astronaut Training Facility to see where NASA astronauts train. Included on general admission, requires boarding pass (book on arrival with staff members at Guest Services Desk or with free app ).
  • Historic Mission Control tour. This tour visit the actual mission control where NASA co-ordinated all the Apollo missions. It also includes Rocket Park. This tour has an additional fee and must be booked in advance when purchasing your general admission ticket. When you book you will choose a timeslot. If you are visiting with a CityPASS , you can pay $15 on site to upgrade to the Mission Control Tram Tour, subject to availability.

Of the tours, personally, I would pick the Mission Control tour as it’s such an iconic location. However, if you don’t want to pay the extra I would opt for the Astronaut Training Facility Tour as it includes Rocket Park.

Note that when we visited Mission Control it was being done up for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landings, so this image isn’t representative of the experience you will have, however I did want to share it as I still though the consoles looked pretty cool – even in plastic wrap!

Space Center Houston Tram Tour Mission Control

If you want, you can actually take multiple tram tours. However, as the tours last 90 minutes to 2 hours, this will use up a lot of the day.

Note also that the locations the trams visit can vary depending on operational schedules and other factors.

The Mission Control tour has pre-booked timed slots which you select when you book your admission ticket.

If you are not taking the Mission Control tram (or are visiting with a CityPASS and want to upgrade to the Mission Control tram), then we would suggest that you make booking your tram tour the first thing you do on arrival.

To take a tram tour, you need a timed boarding pass. You can either get this from the Guest Services desk at the entrance, or you can download the free Space Center Houston app and book that way.

Note that if you take the VIP tour, you have your own private minivan tour of the NASA Johnson Space Center.

Tram tours normally run from fifteen minutes after the Space Center opens, and run every 20 minutes, until 2 hours before closing. For example. if the Space Center closes at 5pm, the last tram will depart at 3pm.

We highly recommend checking times and booking your boarding pass for the tram as soon as you arrive, so you can be sure not to miss out.

Once you have booked the tram tour, you can explore the remainder of the museum at your own leisure until it is time to board.

Space Center Houston Tram Tour

What are the Highlights of Space Center Houston?

If you are visiting the Space Center for a limited amount of time, you might be wondering what the best way to make the most of your time would be.

If it was me, my priority would be to take the tram tour over anything else. That’s because this is a really unique experience that you can’t get anywhere else.

The museum and all the exhibits are also excellent. However, if we had to pick some favourites for your visit, we’s suggest you visit:

  • Independence Plaza, home to the world’s only shuttle replica, which is mounted on an actual shuttle carrying 747 aircraft
  • The original Apollo 17 Command Module, which has flown to the moon. This is in the Starship Gallery
  • The moon rock exhibit where you can actually touch a piece of moon rock. This is also in the Starship Gallery
  • The gift shop, because it’s awesome!

Ideally though you will be able to see and do a lot more than the above.

Independence Plaza Space Center Houston

Is Food Available at Space Center Houston?

Yes, food is available for purchase at the Space Center. The dining area is called the Zero-G diner, and it has a range of food options from sandwiches and vegetarian options through to grilled food, burgers, and pizzas.

Food is not included on your entry ticket unless you have the lunch with an astronaut tour pre-booked, in which case you will have lunch served in a different location.

The Zero G diner does offer a 10% discount to Space Center Houston members, members of the U.S. military, and senior citizens. Be sure to present your I.D. before ordering to claim any discounts.

Is there an Audio Tour of Space Center Houston?

Space Center Houston offers the Space Center App for smartphones. This includes an audio tour, GPS maps of the location, AR experiences, and more.

This is available as a free download for both Android and Apple smartphones. You can find the correct link here .

We’d highly recommend getting this in advance of your visit, and remembering to bring a pair of headphones so you can take full advantage of it.

Up until 2018 there was a separate audio guide that was purchasable for a fee, however this is no longer offered as an option.

Is Space Center Houston Accessible?

Space Center Houston has made great efforts to provide a fully accessible experience across a range of accessibility needs.

In terms of general physical accessibility, all the exhibitions, theaters and tours are fully accessible to wheelchair users. There are also wheelchairs available on site on a first come first served basis.

Beyond physical accessibility, there are a number of other accessibility features, including events and programs for autism and sensory accessibility, deaf and hard of hearing accessibility and visual accessibility. Service animals, as defined by the ADA and Texas laws, are also permitted.

There’s an excellent page on the official Space Center website here , all about the various accessibility options and programmes available. We’d also recommend you reach our directly to the Space Center with any accessibility questions or needs you may have prior to your visit if you have any further queries.

Other Attractions near Space Center Houston

Space Center Houston is around 30 – 40 minutes drive south east of Houston, so you might be wondering if there are other attractions in the area.

The closest attraction which is popular with visitors to Houston, which is also covered on the Houston City PASS , is the Kemah Boardwalk . This is a large boardwalk which is home to a number of amusement rides, games, restaurants, and attractions. A great place for families.

You can either visit here yourself with a car, or you can take a tour from Houston that includes both the  Space Center and Kemah Boardwalk like this .

For more inspiration on other things to do near the Space Center and in Houston in general, see our guide to things to do in Houston .

How Busy is Space Center Houston?

The Space Center is one of the most popular attractions in Houston, and as such it does get quite busy. The busiest times are on holidays, weekends, and during the summer.

If possible, we’d advise visiting outside of these times. During the busiest times, there can be long wait times for the tram tour in particular.

In addition, the Space Center is popular with school groups. These visit throughout the year, but the main months are March, April, and May.

These can definitely raise the volume level in the Space Center, and make it much busier, so bear this in mind if visiting during these months.

Space Center Houston Tram Tour infopoint

Opening Hours for Space Center Houston

Space Center Houston is open year round except on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Standard opening times are from 10am – 5pm, however during busy times they can open at 9am, and close at 6pm.

You can see a full day by day schedule of opening hours on the official website here . Note that opening hours are subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances, although this is rare.

Contact Information for Space Center Houston

If you want to contact the Space Center, you have a few options. First, most of your questions should be answered on their website, which you can see here .

If you still have questions about your visit, you can contact the Space Center by e-mail or phone.

Contact e-mail addresses are [email protected] or  [email protected] . The phone number is +1 281-244-2100.

In my experience, e-mail was the fastest way to reach them for specific queries. The phone line has a number of automated response options with ticketing information and prices, but I wasn’t personally able to reach a human. E-mail responses on the other hand were fast and accurate.

Our Experience Visiting Space Center Houston

We visited Space Center Houston mid-week in late September, which turned out to be a great option as it was not too busy. The first thing we did was visit the tram tour info point, where we learnt the tram schedule for the day.

It was obvious when we visited the info point that there weren’t going to be major lines for the tram on the day of our visit.

This isn’t always the case of course, and at busy times the lines for the tram can be much longer – we were just lucky!

In addition, as we were lucky to be visiting on a quieter day, the tram was scheduled to visit all the highlights, so we didn’t have to pick a tram route.

We decided to come back to around 15 minutes in advance of a departure and spend some time exploring some of the exhibits. We visited the ISS display, the Starship Gallery, and the Mission to Mars exhibit.

Space Center Houston

Then, it was time for the tram ride. As previously mentioned, there are usually different tram routes to choose from, but the day we visited it was less busy and so they were running a combined tour. This means we got to visit Mission Control, the astronaut training center, and the Rocket Park, which was pretty awesome.

The tram ride took just under two hours, and was the definite highlight of our experience. Seeing the historic Mission Control room, which was home to so many important moments in the space programme, was really something special. And this was despite much of it being covered in wrapping due to refurbishment!

We also enjoyed seeing the huge astronaut training center, but I have to say, the Rocket Park was something else. There’s nothing quite like being up close to a Saturn V rocket to give you an idea of the scale of these vehicles.

We were lucky enough to visit the US Space and Rocket Center  whilst attending Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama , which is home to two more Saturn V rockets, and they were just as impressive!

Finally, after the tram tour, we visited the remainder of the main sights we wanted to see. The Independence Plaza was definitely a highlight – being able to get up inside one of the actual 747 shuttle carrier aircraft was a real experience, and seeing the scale of the shuttle against the 747 was amazing.

Independence Plaza Space Center Houston

Tours of Space Center Houston

If you are visiting Houston and would prefer to take a tour that includes the Space Center, we’ve found the following two options for you to consider. These both include entry to the Space Center, return transport, plus some time exploring Houston itself.

  • The first option is this 6 hour tour of Houston which also includes transport to and from Space Center Houston, as well as entry and a tour of the city
  • The second option is this longer full day tour  which includes a 1.5 hour tour of Houston, as well as time at the Space Centre and the Kemah Boardwalk.

Hopefully one of those tours might work for you!

Where to stay near Space Center Houston

If you plan on spending a full day at Space Center Houston, as we recommend that you do, then you might prefer to stay near the Space Center. This means you can be first in the door when it opens, and maximise your time.

We’ve found a number of accommodation options near the Space Center, at a variety of price points.

  • Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham – This well rated budget 2* hotel is the closest option to the Space Center – it’s less than ten minutes walk across to the Space Center. There’s free on-site parking, work desks in the rooms, private bathrooms, and continental breakfast is included.
  • Super 8 by Wyndham  – Another well rated 2* property, this one is just a mile from Space Centre Houston. Rooms have private bathroom and coffee makers, there’s free parking, and continental breakfast is included.
  • Best Western Webster – Another highly rated budget 2* property (there’s no shortage of choice in this area). Found 10 minutes drive from the Space Center. Rooms have refrigerators and microwaves, as well as work space. Parking is free and breakfast is also included.
  • Springhill Suites Houston – A well rated 3* hotel around 6 minutes drive from the Space Center. Rooms are all suites with separate living areas as well as a refrigerator and microwave. Breakfast and parking are included, and laundry / gym services are offered.
  • TownePlace Suites by Marriott – Found 2 miles from the Space Center, this well-rated 3* property offers self-catering suites which include a microwave, oven, stove and refrigerator. There’s also a gym, pool, and jacuzzi. Breakfast and parking are also available on site.
  • Holiday Inn Kemah  – If you want a hotel near the Kemah Boardwalk, this well rated 3* option would be our pick. It’s within walking distance from the boardwalk, and rooms feature microwaves, fridges, and tea/coffee making facilities. Free parking is included, and breakfast is optional.

Between these options we hope you will find something to suit your needs and budget.

Further Reading

Well, that’s it for our guide to visiting the Space Center in Houston, Texas. Before you go, we wanted to share some other content that we think you’ll find useful in planning your trip.

  • There’s lots more to do in Houston beyond the Space Center. See our guide to things to do in Houston for some inspiration.
  • If you’re visiting a number of cities in Texas, we have guides to a number of those as well! We have a guide to things to do in Austin , things to do in San Antonio , as well as a guide to things to do in Dallas
  • If you do visit San Antonio, we also have a detailed guide to visiting the Alamo , and the  San Antonio River Walk , which will help you plan your time visiting these two popular San Antonio attractions
  • Love space? So do we, and the Space Center in Houston is far from the first space attraction we’ve written about! We have a guide to visiting the U.S. Space and Rocket Center , a guide to attending Space Camp , a  guide to  getting into space as a tourist , and a guide to New Mexico’s Space Trail , for more space related fun!
  • We also have lots of resources to help you plan a trip to the USA. See our guides to  how much it costs to travel in the USA  and  driving in the USA  as starting points.
  • If you want some road trip inspiration, see our itineraries for a  USA Deep South road trip ,  California Road Trip ,  Route 66 Road Trip  and  Pacific Coast Highway Road Trip
  • We’ve visited a lot of other cities in the USA! See our guides to  Things to do in Huntsville ,  Things to do in Savannah ,  Things to do in Charleston ,  Things to do in Albuquerque ,  Visiting New Orleans During Mardi Gras ,  Things to do in Cambria  and  Things to do in Santa Fe  to get started!

We hope you’ve found our guide to the Space Center in Houston useful! As always, we’re happy to hear your feedback and answer your questions. Just use the comments section below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

A detailed guide to visiting the Space Center in Houston. Has everything you need to know to plan your visit, including highlights, the tram tour, and more!

Enjoyed this post? Why not share it!

There are 8 comments on this post

Please scroll to the end to leave a comment

Maryam Boone says

25th February 2023 at 2:34 am

Your information was EXCELLENT! I’ve lived in Houston for 2 years now but haven’t had a chance to visit the Space Center -even though I’ve driven past it going to Galveston several times. My daughter and son-in-law are coming to visit and we are going this weekend. I had viewed the Space Center’s website last month but still had a few questions. Your information answered all of my questions and was much, much better than the Space Center’s site! Thank you so much for giving such detailed and informative information. If this is the type of information you provide about other attractions you visit, then these attractions should pay you for the excellent information you provide!

Laurence Norah says

25th February 2023 at 6:07 am

Hey Maryam,

Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment and let me know! It’s much appreciated 🙂 I hope you guys have an awesome visit to the Space Center! I’d love to hear how it goes, and if you notice anything there that isn’t quite right in my guide, feel free to let me know 🙂

Philip Baker says

12th March 2021 at 10:48 am

Hi, thinking of having a holiday in Texas march 22 if they let us fly from UK and was looking on Google maps for places to visit, two days later your site popped up on my phone, must say best travel site I have seen. Phil

12th March 2021 at 10:59 am

Thanks so much Phil, that’s very kind of you to take the time to let us know! I hope you are able to take advantage of our tips on a trip to Texas, and if you have any questions, just let me know 🙂

Kurt Peterson says

27th October 2019 at 1:24 am

Laurence and Jessica, Thank you for the great piece on The Space Center in Houston. My wife and I are looking forward to our visit in mid November. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to visit both The Kennedy Space Center and the NASA facility in Huntsville. We are throughly excited about seeing the ‘real’ mission control room. Seeing the Saturn 5 rocket is always pretty amazing. Thanks again, Kurt and Veronica Peterson

27th October 2019 at 1:57 pm

Our pleasure Kurt! Have an amazing time, and do let us know how you enjoy it compared to the other locations you’ve visited 😀

Sesh Komanduri says

13th August 2019 at 11:43 am

Excellent write-up, Jessica and Laurence. I finally found the guide I was looking for!! One quick question. Is it easy to get a Uber/lyft on the way back from the Space Center to downtown? I want to use that option rather than a standard tour so that I have maximum time at the Center and return as per my convenience. But dont want to get stranded there without transport!!

13th August 2019 at 12:05 pm

So we’ve not personally done this ride with Uber or Lyft, but looking at what other travellers have said and checking the Uber app, it does look like it shouldn’t be a problem 🙂

Have a great time!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Let me know when there's a reply to my comment (just replies to your comment, no other e-mails, we promise!)

Subscribe to our monthly Newsletter where we share our latest travel news and tips. This also makes you eligible to enter our monthly giveaways!

We only ask for your e-mail so we can verify you are human and if requested notify you of a reply. To do this, we store your data as outlined in our privacy policy . Your e-mail will not be published or used for any other reason other than those outlined above.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

To revisit this article, select My Account, then   View saved stories

How NASA Restored Mission Control for the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

By Stefanie Waldek

Photography by NASA

room with computers and desks and chairs

When you step through the door to NASA’s historic Mission Operations Control Room 2, you’re stepping back in time to July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon. Coffee mugs dot the consoles, where ashtrays, pencils, and binders also sit slightly askew. It’s as if the men who operated the machines have simply stepped out for a break—and that’s intentional. On June 29, 2019, NASA officially reopened Mission Control after a $5 million restoration that ensured every last detail, from the displays on the consoles to the carpet on the floor, was brought back to life.

The site, which had been added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1985, had suffered wear and tear over the decades after being used not only for the Gemini and Apollo missions but also for the Space Shuttle. Then, when NASA opened a new facility in the same building in 1998, historic Mission Control was hurriedly returned to its Apollo 15–era configurations. The room was occasionally visited by tourists or curious staffers, but otherwise, it languished.

Six years ago, Johnson Space Center’s historic preservation officer Sandra Tetley took action. “I applied for a grant from the National Park Service heritage partnership program. What I wanted was $5,000 to create a visitor experience in the viewing room,” says Tetley. “The Park Service came down, and when they saw the state of Mission Control, they offered me $20,000 and a $20,000 matching grant to do a historic furnishing survey, which was a meticulous analysis of what it would take to bring the room back to its original state.”

people in a room next to computers

Mission Control during Apollo 11.

While NASA itself didn’t have room in its budget for the restoration, it wasn’t terribly difficult to fundraise. The city of Webster, a Houston suburb near Johnson, where many NASA employees lived, donated the majority of the funds, while a Kickstarter campaign added to the sum.

It was obvious that the iconic green mint consoles needed to be restored—they were updated for use during the Space Shuttle program from 1981 to 1992, then subsequently restored to their original condition during the Apollo 15 mission when the room was retired. For the most recent update, they were sent to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, where they were restored by the SpaceWorks division to feature not only the original hardware-like buttons but also the displays on the monitors. But the bones of the room itself, from the carpet to the ceiling tiles, were in desperate need of updating, after the wear and tear of decades of use—and plenty of clouds of tobacco smoke.

Stern and Bucek Architects was tasked with the restoration, with principal David Bucek, project manager Jordan Shelton, and preservation specialist Delaney Harris-Finch working in tandem with Tetley. The process began with a deep dive into all available material on the room, from photographs from NASA’s archives to the original blueprints of the room to, sometime later on in the process, the newly discovered film footage that became the 2019 documentary Apollo 11. “We consulted with all the flight directors that were available to talk about their consoles and what they did at them,” said Bucek. “They really wanted visitors to see what they saw, not something new or made up to tell another story.”

The process that followed was nothing short of a NASA-appropriate science experiment. The restoration team was able to find original samples across the site, from wallpaper tucked behind a fire extinguisher to an untouched patch of carpet beneath a piece of equipment to ceiling tiles in a phone booth in the building’s lobby—these samples were then subjected to forensic analysis for further research, which led to the discovery of the original manufacturers for the products.

The wallpaper, for instance, was traced to one company that had been since acquired by a new one—that new company conveniently had the original rollers for the paper, and it reprinted the wallpaper for the restoration. The carpet, on the other hand, couldn’t be replicated quite as precisely. In the 1960s, carpet was woven on a loom, but today it’s created using tufting machines. Though the restoration team was able to locate the manufacturer of the carpet, Bigelow’s Mohawk division, the method to re-create the exact carpet couldn’t be replicated. But the company created a custom product that appears practically identical to the original.

The restoration team’s attention to detail even extended to the exact pattern of holes on the ceiling tiles. “One of our consultants located an Apollo-era ceiling tile in one of the phone booths in the lobby of the building,” says Shelton. “Standard contemporary ceiling tiles met the specs but didn't have the same pattern.” So Shelton hand-pricked holes in a new tile to match the original exactly—the pattern was made into a mold by the manufacturer, then stamped on each tile installed on the ceiling of Mission Control.

phones and ash trays on a table next to computers

A detail from the restored Mission Control.

Notorious Mobsters at Home: 13 Photos of Domestic Mob Life

By Charlotte Collins

Kacey Musgraves Launches the Colorful Cottagecore Etsy Shop of Our Dreams

By Katie Schultz

The Story Behind the Many Ghost Towns of Abandoned Mansions Across China

By Katherine McLaughlin

The team went a step beyond restoring the bones of the room—they staged it as if it were completely untouched since the day humans first landed on the moon. A number of flight controllers donated some of their personal items from their days at Johnson for the staging, but other items had to be sourced separately.

“We have some original items that were in the room, like some of the reel-to-reel recorders and some slide rulers,” says Harris-Finch. “Sandra also did a big email blast through the Space Center distribution list asking for any donations of items that might still be around the campus, so we were able to get bookshelves, trash bins, binders, coat racks, metal hangers, pens, pencils, clipboards—anything around here for the from the Apollo era.”

The chairs at Johnson Space Center, however, are replaced about every three years, so it was difficult to source the ones from 1969 from the campus alone. They ended up being traced to the original manufacturer, Steelcase, whose archivist was able to share the precise specs of the model used during Apollo 11. Though the upholstery was no longer available, the team commissioned a local weaver to create a replica of the original for the restoration.

And some of the items that needed to be sourced were of a more personal nature, like the coffee mugs, which flight controllers brought from home. “Every coffee mug you see on a console, I saw that coffee mug on a console in a photograph dated 1969,” says Harris-Finch. From the photographs, she deduced the make and model of each mug and sourced them from vintage retailers and websites suchas eBay and Etsy. “This was a historic restoration where every decision, every choice, every material was based off of evidence,” says Harris-Finch. Visitors to Space Center Houston can see the restored Mission Control via the tram tour of NASA’s campus, which will play a part in this weekend’s festivities for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing—July 20, 2019.

Inside a Tucson Home Made From Thousands of Glass Bottles

By Rachel Davies

Couch Review: Maiden Home Dune Sofa

By Elaheh Nozari

Norman Reedus Prepares to Part With His Georgia Home, Neutra’s Adler House Is for Sale, and More Real Estate News

  • Mobile Site
  • Staff Directory
  • Advertise with Ars

Filter by topic

  • Biz & IT
  • Gaming & Culture

Front page layout

Apollo 8 is a Christmas story —

Apollo flight controller 101: every console explained, from the archives: a handy reference to each station in the apollo mission control room..

Lee Hutchinson - Dec 24, 2019 5:15 pm UTC

Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained

Ars recently had the opportunity to spend some quality time touring the restored Apollo "Mission Control" room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. We talked with Sy Liebergot , a retired NASA flight controller who took part in some of the most famous manned space flight missions of all time, including Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. The feature article " Going boldly: Behind the scenes at NASA's hallowed Mission Control Center " goes in depth on what "Mission Control" did during Apollo and how it all worked, but there just wasn't room to fit in detailed descriptions and diagrams of all of the different flight controller consoles—I'm no John Siracusa, after all!

But Ars readers love space, and there was so much extra information that I couldn't sit on it. So this is a station-by-station tour of Historical Mission Operations Control Room 2, or "MOCR 2." As mentioned in the feature, MOCR 2 was used for almost every Gemini and Apollo flight, and in the late 1990s was restored to its Apollo-era appearance. You can visit it if you're in Houston, but you won't get any closer than the glassed-in visitor gallery in the back, and that's just not close enough. Strap yourselves in and prepare for an up-close look at the MOCR consoles, Ars style.

For most of Project Apollo, MOCR 2 had a fixed layout. Each station handled a specific, related group of functions; some watched over the spacecraft's hardware, or its software, or its position in space, or over the crew itself. Here's how things were laid out for most of Project Apollo:

MOCR 2's layout through most of Project Apollo.

Projection screens

An Eidophor projector.

MOCR 2 is dominated by five large rear-projection displays at the front, which are topped by nine smaller displays showing chronographic information. The large center display, called the "ten by twenty" by Sy Liebergot (it measures 10 feet tall and 20 feet wide) was primarily used to display the vehicle's position and status during the current phase of the mission, using a complex system of physical slides overlaid on plots or columns of numbers. Housed at several positions within the projection space behind the screens were powerful quartz-lamp Eidophor video projectors, which bounced images off of mirrors and up onto the screen surfaces.

The side screens could be used to display the same channels as the individual console screens; Sy noted that during Apollo, the left-most screens might be set to display the vehicle command history and the current page of the flight plan; the right-most Eidophor was used to display television images, either from cameras used during the mission or from network TV channels when needed. The mainframe-generated, slide-overlaid images the Eidophors projected up onto the screens were quite crisp and clear.

Eidophor projections of the Apollo 11 lunar module descent stage trajectory during the first manned lunar landing. The Eidophor video projectors showed a very sharp image.

reader comments

Channel ars technica.

What To Know Before You Visit NASA’s Houston Space Center

' src=

  • February 9, 2023

What To Know Before You Visit NASA’s Houston Space Center

Houston Space Center is located about 30-45 minutes from downtown Houston and is located at 1601 E NASA Pkwy, Houston, TX 77058. They are open daily starting at 10:00AM. Houston Space Center has a main building to explore their museum section, a theater, a food court, and most importantly, their tram tours.

Your general admission ticket will include ALL three tram tours. The tours really made my experience at the Space Center very special so it is not something I could skip. If you only have time to go on one tour and skip the main building of the Space Center, I would do it.

There are currently three tram tours at Space Center Houston: Red Tram Tour (George Abbey Rocket Park Tour), Blue Tram Tour (Astronaut Training Facility Tour, and the White Tram Tour (Apollo Mission Control Tour). I HIGHLY recommend to go to Houston Space Center as soon as they open and IMMEDIATLY reserve the tours you want to go on. The Apollo Mission Control Center books up VERY quickly and is on a first-come first-serve basis. You can reserve a tour by downloading their app or by going to guest services.

apollo mission control tour nasa

Pictured: the Original Apollo Control Center (White Tram Tour)

The Original Apollo Control Center should be everyone’s number one top priority because it is the most popular tour. You are able to go to the ORIGINAL Apollo Mission Control Center where they monitored and communicated the first moon landing, Apollo 11, in 1969.

Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins were the astronauts involved in Apollo 11. I was shocked to know the lack of technology they had back in 1969. We have more technology in a single photo on our smart phone than what they had to land the moon!

At George W.S. Abbey Rocket Park (Red Tram Tour) you will be able to See Saturn V. My favorite thing about his exhibit is not only do you get to see a rocket up-close-in-person but you also get to read about each of the Apollo missions along the walls.

apollo mission control tour nasa

When you go on the Astronaut Training Facility (Blue Tram Tour), you will be able to see how they train astronauts to go to outer space. I found out that your vision and taste changes you go into space so they train astronauts on how to prepare for that. Once the astronauts are in outer space, they have to exercise two hours a day to prevent any muscle loss. They don’t just train their astronauts physical but psychologically as well. Astronauts have to have a psychological evaluation before going to space.

apollo mission control tour nasa

Other than visiting the Original Apollo Mission Control Center, my favorite thing about the space center was taking the tram tour throughout the space center’s grounds. Houston Space Center is its own town and is massive. They have their own fire department, police department, and restaurants. Houston Space Center has 1,000+ acres and employs about 8,000 people. In the 1960s bikes were donated to the facility so people could commute building to building and employees still use them.

apollo mission control tour nasa

Houston Space Center is a wildlife preserve and is home to many animals.

Click here to find out more information about Houston’s Space Center and to purchase tickets!

You May Also Like

Going to Houston’s Space Center After Your Cruise? | Luggage Storage Solution 

May 17, 2022

Going to Houston’s Space Center After Your Cruise? | Luggage Storage Solution 

Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, TX

August 14, 2023

Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, TX

Advertisement

Supported by

NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon

The restored room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back.

  • Share full article

apollo mission control tour nasa

By David W. Brown

[ Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing . | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email .]

HOUSTON — After Gene Kranz retired in the 1990s, he started to give occasional tours to V.I.P.s at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

It was there in the Apollo Mission Control Center that Mr. Kranz had a view like few others during the highest highs and lowest lows of the moon race. As a flight director, he helped lead the complex human and technical operation that managed the triumph of the Apollo 11 moon landing 50 years ago. He also rallied and refocused NASA mission flight controllers after the tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967, when Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire during a launchpad simulation.

But mission control was a mess.

Mr. Kranz would have to show up early before each tour to police the place. He had to pick up trash left on computer consoles that had once landed men on the moon. Water bottles, Coke cans. He would empty brimming wastebaskets.

“This place was not representative of historic mission control,” Mr. Kranz said. It was likewise a technical mess. “The configuration of the consoles in no way represented where we were and what we did.”

On Friday, Mr. Kranz and Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, cut a ribbon signifying the official reopening of the restored Apollo Mission Control Center. It was a three-year, $5 million project, and every inch of the famed heart of America’s lunar aspirations was repaired and refurbished. Its reopening comes three weeks before the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, and helps to kick off Apollo festivities across the country.

[ Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar .]

Apollo mission control had been abandoned in 1992, with all operations moved to a modernized mission control center elsewhere in the building. Center employees, friends, family — and anyone, really, who had access to Building 30 — could walk in, take a seat, take a lunch break and take pictures.

While they were there, they might take a button from one of the computer consoles. Or a switch or a dial, anything small — a personal memento from an ancient American achievement. The furniture fabric and carpet underfoot grew threadbare. The room was dark; none of the equipment had power. Wires hung where rotary phones had once sat. The giant overhead screens in front of the room were damaged, and the room smelled of mildew. Yellow duct tape held carpet together in places.

“You knew it wasn’t right — you just knew,” said Sandra Tetley, the historic preservation officer at the Johnson Space Center. “But it was not a priority. We are an organization that’s moving toward the future, so there is not a budget to do things like this.”

The project began in earnest six years ago. The anniversary loomed, and that was the catalyst to fix up mission control, and to do it right. “We wanted to meet a high standard to restore it, and we were able to meet this 50th anniversary,” Ms. Tetley said.

The National Park Service established the Apollo Mission Control Center as a national historic landmark in 1985. But once they had resolved to restore the center in 2013, Mr. Kranz, Ms. Tetley, Johnson Space Center project manager Jim Thornton and others were stymied at every turn. There were funding issues and internal turf wars.

The Apollo Mission Control Center is in the middle of an operational building where life-or-death decisions are made for missions in flight. Judgment calls regarding spacewalks, station-threatening debris and solutions to mechanical malfunctions leave little margin for error — or interruption by errant tourists.

Eventually, however, Space Center Houston, a nonprofit educational complex and space museum, took the lead on fund-raising efforts. The nearby city of Webster, Tex., donated $3.5 million of the $5 million necessary to complete the project. A Kickstarter campaign and independent donations filled in the rest.

Like the Oval Office, or the Assembly Room of Independence Hall, mission control is a distinctly American room — one so ingrained into culture that to say its name is to conjure it crisply in the mind, as though you had been there, even worked there. And the restoration was completed in a way that is true to its place in the American historical imagination.

Four long rows of pale green consoles fill the room. There are white panels overhead and new beige carpet below. Lights dance purposefully on the consoles, with each one playing Apollo-accurate video broadcasts as would have been seen at the time of the moon landings, or displaying grids of numbers and prehistoric computer code. On four giant displays in the room’s front are maps, matrices and astronaut positional plots.

On the consoles are the objects seen in photographs from the Apollo era. Ashtrays and coffee cups, staplers and stopwatches, pens and pencils, headsets and rotary dial phones. There are mission control manuals three inches thick and canisters for pneumatic tubes. Binders and eyeglasses and cigar boxes sit next to cans of RC Cola and packs of Winston cigarettes. The room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. Every item is authentic, painstakingly researched from grainy photographs.

“It was a herculean effort by the team to really pull off what we pulled off in that room today,” said Jennifer Keys, the project manager of the restoration team.

Ceiling tiles that matched the originals were eventually recovered from a lobby phone booth elsewhere at the Johnson Space Center. Preserved wallpaper was discovered behind a fire extinguisher. All had to be meticulously matched or fabricated identically. Original paint was found for the consoles. And across those consoles, the artifacts of a time gone by.

“We tracked things down on eBay, from people’s donations — whatever we could scrounge up,” Ms. Keys said. “We did a scavenger hunt across Johnson Space Center to find things like trash cans, chairs and binders.”

The flight crews of Apollo mission control were known for their attention to detail. It is how they got every astronaut home. The restoration team showed no less respect for fine details, and the effect is uncanny.

From the observation gallery, you can all but see phantom engineers in white shirts and black ties speaking into headsets very calmly about high-stakes orbital maneuvers, see them making notes and pushing those buttons. The stories there play out in your imagination, and yet before your eyes.

Christopher Kraft , who invented flight operations for NASA when the agency was formed, is credited with designing mission control. Nothing like the space program had existed, and there were no models for how it should be done. The air traffic control model would not work, because the tower in that setting has a line of sight on everything in its aegis. Mission control’s domain, on the other hand, is abstract: a specific set of procedures at any one time, and problems that are solved with mathematics and moxie.

[ Read The Times obituary for Mr. Kraft, who died on July 22 .]

The genius of its design is reflected in the present-day mission control center that runs operations for the International Space Station. The computers are smaller, the monitors larger, tabletops wider and office chairs nicer.

But the design of the room is virtually identical. Five giant screens loom above, with mission status updates and feeds from orbit. And though the time of the Apollo generation draws rapidly to a close, the things used by mission control operators are still basically the same.

From the gallery, it is all plainly visible. Desktops are lined with coffee cups and Coca-Cola cans, pens and paperwork, binders, headsets and eyeglasses. The room is crowded and calm, the stakes still high. As NASA plots an American return to the moon in the next decade with the Artemis mission , the stakes will get higher yet.

Guided tours for the public will begin on July 1. Earlier this week, Mr. Kranz walked into the newly restored mission control for the first time. He approved.

“It was dazzling,” he said. “You couldn’t believe this. All of a sudden you were 50 years younger and you wanted to work in there. I wanted back in that room to work.”

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a NASA employee. He was Christopher Kraft, not Craft. It also misspelled the surname of one of the astronauts who died in the Apollo 1 tragedy in 1967. He was Roger Chaffee, not Chafee.

How we handle corrections

Advertisement

Why a private mission to the moon is still a win for America

  • Joelle Renstrom

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center with Intuitive Machines' Nova-C moon lander mission, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Feb. 15. (Photo by Gregg Newton / AFP via Getty Images)

In spaceflight lingo, “seven minutes of terror” describes the tense stretch of time when mission control loses communication with a spacecraft during the final descent to its celestial destination. Throughout these seemingly endless minutes, humans can only cross their fingers and hope the craft navigates the landing successfully on its own.

While seven minutes sounds like a long time to be out of contact with a spacecraft, the past two successful moon landings — India’s in 2023 and Japan’s earlier this year — involved 18 and 20 minutes of terrifying silence. Thursday, employees of Intuitive Machines, SpaceX and NASA will endure a similar, agonizing silence as the Odysseus lander tries to settle safely on the moon.

A successful lunar landing by Odysseus would be the first by a private company and would underscore the fundamental role public-private partnerships will play in America's space future. It would also be a much-needed win for American space flight, which for years has been in a holding pattern. Although the U.S. was the first country to put a person on the moon, we've long been behind in the race to return and to develop a consistent lunar presence.

Odysseus , made by Intuitive Machines and affectionately known as “Odie,” launched on Feb. 15. The six-day journey to lunar orbit will culminate in a landing attempt in a crater called Malapert A , near the south pole of the moon. So far, only spacecraft from China and India have landed on this hemisphere of the moon, with India’s Chandrayaan-3 touching down farther south in a region scientists believe contains large quantities of water in the form of ice .   Extracting and processing that ice could support astronauts living on the moon, as well as facilitate the production of rocket fuel, sparing crews from having to return to Earth to refuel.

This mission is significant and historic. If successful, Odysseus would be the first spacecraft made by a private company to land on the moon. All of the other landers have been part of government missions. SpaceX takes both astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station, but neither that company nor any other has made it to another celestial body intact. Three private companies have tried in recent years: Israel’s Beresheet lander (2019) and Japan’s Hakuto-R (2023) both smashed into the lunar surface, and earlier this year, the Peregrine lander made by American company Astrobiotic suffered a propellant leak and eventually burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.

While collaborations between NASA and private companies aren’t new (in addition to transport services, NASA has long contracted private companies to make space shuttles and rockets), the partnerships involved in the Odysseus mission resemble nesting dolls — inside each piece of equipment is an object made by another entity, indicating how crucial these alliances have become. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket booster launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

That rocket carried a lunar lander made by Intuitive Machines. Inside that lander are six NASA instruments that will harvest data about the nearby environment for use in future lunar missions. Odie is also carrying payloads from private customers, including Columbia Sportswear (what better way to test insulation?) and sculptor Jeff Koons , who created 150 small pieces for his Moon Phases Project , which may soon become the first art on the moon. Also among the interesting cargo is Arch Mission Foundation’s LunaPrise, part of its Lunar Lab Repository project intended to store human knowledge securely forever. (People can submit stories and information , or “Lunagrams,” online).

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Feb. 15. (Gregg Newton/AFP via Getty Images)

A successful landing would signify a much-needed win for American space ventures. The U.S. hasn’t landed anything or anyone on the moon in this millennium (the last Apollo mission was in 1972 ). Ironically, neither has Russia; in 2023, Russia's first lunar spacecraft in nearly 50 years crashed into the moon’s surface . China, India and Japan's successful robotic moon landings in the past five years represent a power shift likely to have implications for years, if not decades, to come.

Finally, this mission is an important step in returning humans to the moon. The last human to set foot on the lunar surface, Gene Cernan, did so in 1972. The Apollo program was more about winning the Space Race than establishing a consistent (or even sporadic) presence on the moon. NASA, the only organization to put a person on the moon, is incredibly out of practice. Successful robotic lunar landings are no easy feat, as evidenced by recent failures. NASA can make future landings easier by leveraging Odysseus to gather and transmit topographical and other environmental data back to Earth.

NASA’s Artemis program seeks to return humans — including the first female and the first person of color — to the moon. Artemis III, the first crewed mission, was originally scheduled for late 2025 but has been pushed back to late 2026 . Many believe even that date to be optimistic and consider 2027 a more likely timeframe. Additional failures in lunar spacecraft landings, whether private or national, could highlight concerns or implications that could add more time to these scheduled missions.

Odysseus has sent back its first batch of space selfies from the journey. Soon, those selfies might include images from the moon. If that happens, Odysseus will explore the lunar surface for a week. When the lunar night — a frigid, two-week stretch of darkness — sets in, Odie’s mission will conclude. To learn whether Odie gets that far and what it learns on the moon, we’ll have to watch and wait.

Follow Cognoscenti on Facebook and Instagram .

  • In latest lunar landing trial, Intuitive Machines hopes to get U.S. back to the moon
  • Also by Joelle Renstrom: Artemis finally launched. But we’ll need humility to return to the moon
  • Tim Ritchie: Science and the sacred aren’t in eternal conflict. They are siblings, born of wonder

Headshot of Joelle Renstrom

Joelle Renstrom Cognoscenti contributor Joelle Renstrom is a science writer whose work has appeared in Slate, The Guardian, Aeon, Undark and other publications. She also wrote the essay collection "Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature." She teaches at Boston University.

More from WBUR

RoundupReads

Building on a Mission: Houston’s Mission Control Center

60th anniversary banner

NASA’s Mission Control Center (MCC) in Houston has served as the nerve center for American human spaceflight since June 1965. Perhaps the most visible aspect of human spaceflight, the MCC is the familiar scene on television of flight controllers monitoring all aspects of a mission on their consoles, with large screens displaying the location of the spacecraft on a world map. Following the establishment of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in 1961, and construction of the new facility, the mission control function shifted from Cape Kennedy in Florida to Houston.

The concepts of mission control developed in the early years of the space program are still in use today, even as human missions have grown more complex and now include international and commercial partners. Starting with missions lasting only a few hours or a few days, monitoring of the International Space Station is an ongoing, around-the-clock activity. Over the decades, upgrades to the MCC have enabled it to keep up with the demands of the ever-growing complexity of America’s human spaceflight programs.

Two views of early construction of what was then called the Integrated Mission Control Center in June 1963. Left: The administration wing. Right: The mission operations wing. Credits: NASA

Two views of early construction of what was then called the Integrated Mission Control Center in June 1963. Left: The administration wing. Right: The mission operations wing. Credits: NASA

In the early days of America’s space program, NASA’s first flight director, Christopher C. Kraft , developed the concept of a mission control center to monitor human spaceflights. The first control center at the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida, now called the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, monitored the Mercury and early Gemini missions. With the establishment of the MSC in Houston in 1961, the new facility’s main tasks included the control of America’s human spaceflights. The new MCC offered many advantages over the older control center at the Cape, including the flexibility needed for the more complex Gemini missions — especially the Apollo Moon-landing missions. Work on the MCC, located in MSC’s Building 30, began in late 1962 with the laying of its foundation. Further construction took place between June 1963 and November 1964.

In its original form, the three-story MCC included an administration wing of offices and conference rooms, and a mission operations wing that housed two Mission Operations Control Rooms, or MOCRs, the two wings joined by a lobby wing. Workers installed the MCC’s real-time computer complex, the brains of the installation, in April 1964. Two months later, employees moved from temporary facilities in the Stahl and Myers and Houston Petroleum Center buildings in southeast Houston into Building 30 to begin testing the equipment.

Then and now. Left: The Mission Control Center as it appeared in June 1964. Right: The MCC in September 2021, showing the addition of the five-story station operations wing on the left side of the image. Credits: NASA

Then and now. Left: The Mission Control Center as it appeared in June 1964. Right: The MCC in September 2021, showing the addition of the five-story station operations wing on the left side of the image. Credits: NASA

By January 1965, enough of the equipment had been installed and tested that a team of controllers could monitor the flight of the uncrewed Gemini 2 mission, with primary control of the flight still residing in the Gemini Control Center at Cape Kennedy.

Left: View of the Mission Operations Control Room during the uncrewed Gemini 2 mission on Jan. 19, 1965. Right: One of the flight controllers monitoring the Gemini 2 mission. Credits: NASA

Left: View of the Mission Operations Control Room during the uncrewed Gemini 2 mission on Jan. 19, 1965. Right: One of the flight controllers monitoring the Gemini 2 mission. Credits: NASA

During the March 23, 1965, Gemini 3 mission, the first crewed Gemini flight, the MOCR served in a backup capacity to the Gemini Control Center at the Cape. Following that successful activity, on April 9, NASA Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight George E. Mueller announced the change of primary flight control for human space missions from the Cape to the new MCC in Houston. He also announced that Kraft would serve as mission director for Gemini IV and as one of the three flight directors for the mission. John D. Hodge and Eugene F. “Gene” Kranz would serve as the other two flight directors during the historic four-day mission that included America’s first spacewalk. Hodge and Kranz both served as flight directors with Kraft during Mercury missions.

Left: During Gemini 3, the first crewed Gemini mission on March 23, 1965, the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) served in a backup capacity to the primary control center in Cape Kennedy, Florida. Right: Flight Directors Eugene F. “Gene” Kranz, Glynn S. Lunney, and John D. Hodge, with the original flight director, Christopher C. Kraft, in the MOCR in February 1965. Credits: NASA

Left: During Gemini 3, the first crewed Gemini mission on March 23, 1965, the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) served in a backup capacity to the primary control center in Cape Kennedy, Florida. Right: Flight Directors Eugene F. “Gene” Kranz, Glynn S. Lunney , and John D. Hodge, with the original flight director, Christopher C. Kraft Jr., in the MOCR in February 1965. Credits: NASA

Left: The MOCR during the Gemini IV mission in June 1965, the first mission controlled from the Houston facility. Right: Families of the Gemini IV astronauts talk with them from the MOCR. Credits: NASA

Left: The MOCR during the Gemini IV mission in June 1965, the first mission controlled from the Houston facility. Right: Families of the Gemini IV astronauts talk with them from the MOCR. Credits: NASA

With two operational MOCRs, following Gemini IV, the remaining eight Gemini missions were controlled from the room on the third floor of Building 30’s mission operations wing. Engineers configured the MOCR on the second floor to monitor the early uncrewed Apollo test flights in 1966. After completion of the Gemini program in November 1966, the third-floor MOCR was modified to support the upcoming Apollo missions, with the two rooms dividing the work. Following the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing mission in July 1969, controlled from the third-floor MOCR-2, the second-floor MOCR-1 was temporarily deactivated until October 1971. It was then used to monitor the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project missions, while MOCR-2 was deactivated in May 1973.

Left: Jubilation in the MOCR following the Apollo 11 splashdown. Right: Engineers and managers confer in the MOCR shortly after an explosion crippled Apollo 13 on its way to the Moon. Credits: NASA

Left: Jubilation in the MOCR following the Apollo 11 splashdown. Right: Engineers and managers confer in the MOCR shortly after an explosion crippled Apollo 13 on its way to the Moon. Credits: NASA

In the mid-1970s, in preparation for the space shuttle era, the MCC received upgrades to its computer systems. The third-floor MOCR-2, renamed the Flight Control Room-2 (FCR-2), monitored the Approach and Landing Test flights of Space Shuttle Enterprise in 1977, following which, it and the second-floor control room, redesignated FCR-1, received upgrades to support the first space shuttle orbital missions. In April 1981, FCR-1 supported the STS-1 mission of Space Shuttle Columbia. In November 1982, FCR-2 supported its first mission, STS-5.

The MOCR following the landing of Space Shuttle Columbia, concluding the STS-1 mission. Credits: NASA

The MOCR following the landing of Space Shuttle Columbia, concluding the STS-1 mission. Credits: NASA

In December 1989, both control rooms received significant upgrades in the form of new glass display screens and image projectors. In December 1992, FCR-2 was decommissioned as an active control room and returned to its Apollo-era configuration and made accessible to visitors, while FCR-1 continued to support shuttle missions until 1996. Beginning in 1992, a new control room, called the White FCR in the newly built five-story station operations wing, the largest addition to the MCC, began partially supporting space shuttle missions. Following a two-year transition, White FCR took over sole operation of shuttle missions with the STS-77 mission in May 1996 and until the end of the program in 2011. The Blue FCR in the new wing supported space station operations from 1998 until 2006, when that function moved into the newly renovated FCR-1 with all-new state-of-the-art equipment. Today, the White FCR is used for simulations of upcoming flights around the Moon as part of the Artemis program.

Left: Flight controllers monitor a spacewalk on the space station from the Flight Control Room-1 (FCR-1) in September 2021. Right: Controllers conduct a simulation of the Artemis 1 mission in the White FCR in June 2021.

Left: Flight controllers monitor a spacewalk on the space station from the Flight Control Room-1 (FCR-1) in September 2021. Right: Controllers conduct a simulation of the Artemis 1 mission in the White FCR in June 2021.

The MCC is truly an historic place, serving as the nerve center of the American human spaceflight program for more than five decades. It bore witness to great triumphs — such as the first human Moon landing — as well as tragedies such as the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle accidents.

In October 1985, the U.S. Department of the Interior designated MOCR-2 as a National Historic Landmark, known as the “Apollo Mission Control Center.” On April 4, 2011, the building was renamed the “Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center” in honor of the man who created the concepts still in use today in human spaceflight control.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the historic MOCR-2 underwent a two-year restoration to return the room to a configuration identical to the one on July 20, 1969. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on June 28, 2019, which was attended by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Kranz. The restored facility can be viewed by the public on tours from Space Center Houston.

Left: In 2011, Christopher C. Kraft Jr. speaks at the ceremony naming Building 30 in his honor. Right: The unveiling of the sign bearing Kraft’s name. Credits: NASA

Left: In 2011, Christopher C. Kraft Jr. speaks at the ceremony naming Building 30 in his honor. Right: The unveiling of the sign bearing Kraft’s name. Credits: NASA

Left: Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the restored Apollo Mission Control Center on June 28, 2019. Right: Overview of the restored room. Credits: NASA

Left: Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the restored Apollo Mission Control Center on June 28, 2019. Right: Overview of the restored room. Credits: NASA

To be continued …

Dressing the room Tetley and her restoration team used archival photos, film footage and records to dress the MOCR, sourcing everything from the brand of pen that the Apollo flight controllers used to commissioning new upholstery to match the chairs on which they sat. "We actually found the rocket coffee pot that was back there," said Tetley, pointing to the corner of the room. "We found that new-in-box on Etsy, so that has been recreated. Even the type of creamer in the coffee they made, or that they drank." Another detail they found were the ash trays that became part of the iconography of the room. "All the cigarette butts that were found when they cleaned the consoles and when they cleaned under the floor, we saved all those," Tetley revealed. The surviving members of the Apollo 11 flight control team were also consulted and many provided their original mission documents to be copied for placement at their consoles. "Each console is very personalized," said Tetley. "We know what they smoked, if they smoked a pipe or cigarettes, what brand. We know what they drank and what their coffee cup looked like. The headsets, documents, it's all very individualized." "It's a great honor to leave [this as] a legacy for the Apollo controllers," she said. "There's so much focus on the astronauts and all that, it's neat to be here making this come back to life."

Newsweek

Incredible Moon Video Maps Exact Apollo Landing Sites

Posted: February 26, 2024 | Last updated: February 26, 2024

This NASA video shows everywhere that we landed on the Moon during the Apollo missions.

More for You

Raskin Compares MAGA Lawmakers to a “Religious Cult” and Predicts Their Futures After the Fall of “Trumpism”

SCOTUS decision about Trump could be troubling for Jordan, Cruz, Biggs, and other GOP lawmakers

FILE - People take photos of the FBI building headquarters in Washington, Aug. 13, 2022. A federal judge has held veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge in civil contempt for refusing to divulge her source for a series of Fox News stories about a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

Judge holds veteran journalist Catherine Herridge in civil contempt for refusing to divulge source

3 pieces of information you should never share in a job interview and what to say instead, from a recruiting manager.

3 pieces of information you should never share in a job interview and what to say instead, from a recruiting manager

Greg Abbott

Greg Abbott Feels the Heat

putin loses top colonel

Putin loses top colonel after missile strike 'on medal ceremony' kills 19

Burger King: Members of Burger King's loyalty service, 'Royal Perks', can get a side of cryptocurrency with their order of $5 or more. Online or in store, using a personalized code requested at the register, users will be rewarded with cryptocurrency.

Burger King offers free Whopper deal in response to Wendy’s 'surge pricing' backlash

‘Apprentice’ winner warns Trump will face more trials because he ‘Thinks He Is Above The Law’

‘Apprentice’ winner warns Trump will face more trials because he ‘Thinks He Is Above The Law’

Bowman walking

Thousands of NY voters switch to Dem Party ahead of 'Squad' member's primary: 'antisemitism' on ballot

Fani Willis is 'self-destructing' before our very eyes: Gregg Jarrett

Fani Willis is 'self-destructing' before our very eyes: Gregg Jarrett

Macy's Is Closing 150 Stores by 2026

Macy's Is Closing 50 Stores Across the Country This Year. Here's a List of Locations We Know So Far.

Most popular movies on Netflix last week

The 10 movies everyone's watching on Netflix right now

US Veterans Burn Their Uniforms In Solidarity With Airman Aaron Bushnell

US Veterans Burn Their Uniforms In Solidarity With Airman Aaron Bushnell

SEI193883016.jpg

Trump echoes Nazi propaganda and pushes lie that ‘no one speaks languages’ of migrants in wild border speech

The Y chromosome is disappearing. Here’s what it means for men

The Y chromosome is disappearing. Here’s what it means for men

Fanis Willis' case against Trump is ‘imploding’: John Yoo

Fanis Willis' case against Trump is ‘imploding’: John Yoo

The IRS is waiving $1B in back tax penalties

'This is a gift': The IRS is waiving $1 billion in penalties for Americans that owe back taxes — here's what you need to know

House Republican prepares

House Republican prepares "discharge petition" on Ukraine aid

The FBI’s new tactic: Catching suspects with push alerts

The FBI’s new tactic: Catching suspects with push alerts

Anne Whitfield Dies: ‘White Christmas', Prolific TV Actor Was 85

Anne Whitfield Dies: ‘White Christmas', Prolific TV Actor Was 85

Letters to the Editor: Trump's racist claim that his indictments draw Black support

Letters to the Editor: Trump's racist claim that his indictments draw Black support

Premium Content

U.S. returns to the moon as NASA's Odysseus successfully touches down

For the first time since 1972, an American mission has landed on the moon for NASA, the first steps in the possible commercialization of deep space.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at night.

In a historic event, a lunar lander named Odysseus has touched down on the moon ’s south pole. It’s the first American mission to the lunar surface since 1972, and the first landing of the Artemis program , NASA’s effort to return people to the moon for extended stays.  

"We are on the surface and we are transmitting," Steve Altemus , CEO of Intuitive Machines, the private company that built the lander, said on a live broadcast. "Welcome to the moon."

NASA administrator Bill Nelson called it "a landing of a lifetime" moments after the touchdown, which occurred at 6:23 p.m. EST. "The U.S. has returned to the moon," he says. "Today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA's commercial partnerships. What a triumph."

The company is unsure of the exact position of Odysseus , but it is alive and talking, following several stressful minutes of silence after landing.

Tensions were also high an hour before, when the spacecraft's primary guidance system stopped working. Mission controllers had to rely on NASA lasers onboard Odysseus to provide the needed light beams, delaying the landing and prompting the lander to circle for an additional orbit around the moon.  

This mission, IM-1, will test landing equipment and scout the prospective location of a future crewed outpost . The Nova-C lander is located next to the crater Malapert A, parts of which are in near-constant darkness—possibly enough to preserve the ice needed to support an inhabited outpost or colony. The lunar south pole is “ one of the best locations for a sustained human presence on the moon ,” according to NASA.

Odysseus , which launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on February 15, carries six NASA payloads, including equipment to conduct radio astronomy, examine space weather, and analyze the lunar surface. It’s built and operated by Intuitive Machines, which is on the forefront of solar system exploration. This landing is also the first successful lunar touchdown by a commercial company. (Read more about the history of moon exploration.)

NASA hopes for more. Today’s landing is the second of many planned robotic lunar missions for the space agency, each in the hands of Intuitive Machines or other private space companies. The first failed in late December, when a lander operated by the company Astrobotic suffered a fuel-sapping propulsion failure.

The Nova-C lunar lander lit by spotlight, on display before an American flag

Now, by landing Odysseus   safely, Intuitive Machines has provided a deep-space example of NASA’s transfer of spacecraft engineering and operation to private companies, says Altemus, who was formerly a deputy director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“We're proving that commercial companies now can do the hard things that were only the purview of sovereign nations."

Space scout  

The Odysseus lander is a hexagonal cylinder, adorned with foil-wrapped instruments and fixed with six metallic legs. A single engine, used for both propulsion and landing, draws from internal liquid methane and liquid oxygen tanks. Dark rectangles of solar panels are designed to generate 200 watts of power on the moon’s surface.

IM-1 is carrying a slew of experimental NASA sensors that will aid in subsequent missions. These include range-finding laser radar systems that help navigate during landings, as well as eight retroreflectors placed on the moon’s surface that will serve as permanent markers for approaching spacecraft.

On the surface, a NASA-designed low-frequency radio receiver will measure the impact of space weather and human activity on the lunar environment. In a precursor to the kind of astronomy that many hope to conduct on the moon, the experiment will also detect radio emissions from the sun, Jupiter , and Earth.

A small camera satellite called EagleCam, built by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University faculty and students, deployed during the descent to capture the first-ever third person views of a moon landing. (See a stunning new glimpse of the moon’s south pole.)

You May Also Like

apollo mission control tour nasa

Why go back to the moon? NASA’s Artemis program has even bigger ambitions

apollo mission control tour nasa

Second SpaceX megarocket launch ends with another explosion. What happens next?

apollo mission control tour nasa

In the Arizona desert, NASA prepares for walking on the moon

Odysseus   landed directly next to a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis III mission, and a candidate location for an inhabited base. The question is, when will the astronauts arrive? NASA’s moon program is now at least six years behind schedule and six billion over budget, according to a May report by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General.

Jim Free, the space agency's chief official for human spaceflight in deep space, recently said at a public presentation that NASA would spend $41.5 billion on the Artemis program between 2024 and 2028, with only a single human landing to show for it. The solitary crewed mission, now set for 2025, is expected to be delayed at least two years.

Multiple moonwalkers

Fears of such massive costs are partly why, since the 1990s, NASA has begun seeding private space company efforts to build and operate spacecraft.

After this proved successful for carrying cargo to the International Space Station, in March 2018 NASA adopted a similar method to accelerate its lunar missions, a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). The effort bore fruit: there are now 14 companies eligible to bid on missions for NASA and six companies with mission contracts for flights scheduled for 2023 and 2024. Each costs about six times less than an equivalent NASA flagship mission.

“Remember, when you land on the moon and you want to stay there for a long time, cargo delivery are just as important as they are in the space station,” says Thomas Zurbuchen , former NASA associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, who spearheaded the CLPS funding.

“What I was hoping when we came up with the idea was to create and develop a series of companies that could be available for Artemis.”

Having multiple landers in operation is central to the idea of CLPS. Instead of funding a single craft built and tested to rigid standards, the program would seed several companies much less money to create their own landers—and accept a much higher risk of mission failure.

As a small, experimental program, CLPS has not attracted much opposition in or out of U.S. Congress, and this successful landing is likely to stave off critics. (Read why Artemis is going back to the moon.)

Even so, in a 2020 report, NASA's Office of the Inspector General noted that NASA personnel “did not evaluate past performance and financial history risks during their evaluation of prospective CLPS contractors” and “relied on contractors self-certifying future funding availability despite poor business, financial histories, and prior performance.”

An unexpected mission

Until 2018, Intuitive Machines was developing drones to fly over forest fires. It didn’t pivot to lunar landers until NASA opened its CLPS competition that year, and it won its first contract in May 2019. Today’s successful IM-1 mission flew under a $118 million NASA contract.

Since winning its first CLPS contract, Intuitive Machines has won two more NASA launches to the moon.

“Nothing was being developed here in 2018 in terms of lunar programs, and now we have our first mission,” Altemus says. “In the time it takes to get an undergraduate degree, we built a whole lunar program.”   (See the Artemis II crew, the first moon astronauts in 50 years.)

Intuitive Machines has plans to offer lunar services to private space companies, as well as NASA, despite its ailing moonshot program.

“Should things move to the right, it's an opportunity for us to keep flying,” Altemus says. “This is more opportunity for CLPS vendors like Intuitive Machines to continue to deliver things to the surface before the humans get there. You want this rover on the surface? We'll take it there. You want this power station up there? We'll take it.”

Related Topics

  • SPACE EXPLORATION
  • PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT

apollo mission control tour nasa

Historic moon lander malfunctions after launch—but NASA isn’t panicked (yet)

apollo mission control tour nasa

Artemis I has (finally) launched, kickstarting NASA’s return to the moon

apollo mission control tour nasa

'Snakes' on the moon? These helpers could soon join our lunar mission.

apollo mission control tour nasa

50 years after Apollo 11, a new moon race is on

apollo mission control tour nasa

How NASA’s Artemis program plans to return astronauts to the moon

  • Environment

History & Culture

  • History & Culture
  • Best of the World
  • Gory Details
  • Mind, Body, Wonder
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Your US State Privacy Rights
  • Children's Online Privacy Policy
  • Interest-Based Ads
  • About Nielsen Measurement
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Nat Geo Home
  • Attend a Live Event
  • Book a Trip
  • Inspire Your Kids
  • Shop Nat Geo
  • Visit the D.C. Museum
  • Learn About Our Impact
  • Support Our Mission
  • Advertise With Us
  • Customer Service
  • Renew Subscription
  • Manage Your Subscription
  • Work at Nat Geo
  • Sign Up for Our Newsletters
  • Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

Houstonia Magazine

  • Eat & Drink
  • Arts & Culture
  • Style & Shopping
  • Travel & Outdoors
  • News & City Life
  • Home & Real Estate
  • Gift Guides
  • Health & Wellness

How NASA Restored Its Historic Apollo Mission Control Center

By Melissa Dalton April 12, 2023

apollo mission control tour nasa

The restoration project focused on accuracy, right down to the brand of cigarettes left at each console.

Image: Courtesy NASA

When Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, the flight controllers and engineers at the Apollo Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) did not technically have eyes on them. That didn’t happen until later, after Armstrong descended the lunar module’s ladder and pulled the handle on a storage compartment that housed the Westinghouse camera inside, activating one of the most famous feeds in history.

During the tension of the landing, NASA staff were glued to their console screens, smoking cigarettes and downing coffee, making critical decisions based on data alone. “We like to tell people that you have more computing power in your phone now than they had in all of mission control,” says Sandra Tetley, a 34-year veteran at Johnson Space Center and the current historic preservation officer. The average age in the MOCR during the Apollo 11 mission, Tetley adds, was just 26.

The moon landing is considered a seminal moment in US (and world) history, a symbol of human achievement and innovation that capped the tumultuous events of the 1960s. Yet in our ever-evolving digital age, it’s easy to forget the magnitude of it all. For years, it was Tetley’s goal to remind us, by restoring the historic Apollo Mission Control Center back to its 1969 heyday—the third such attempt and quite the feat considering just a decade ago there wasn’t much to see.

apollo mission control tour nasa

Help from an Apollo 13 production designer led them to era-appropriate console replicas.

In 1985, Building 30, with its complex of rooms on the third floor that housed mission control, was designated a National Historic Landmark. This was where, from the ’60s into the early ’90s NASA staff oversaw the Apollo program, as well as the Gemini, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, Skylab programs, and shuttle missions, such as Challenger. By 1992, the Apollo MOCR was decommissioned and its shuttle operations moved elsewhere. “It had basically been abandoned,” Tetley says. “They just turned off the electricity and left it.”

Despite that, the Apollo MOCR still had visitors. The public came through the viewing room on tours, NASA staff hosted VIPs on the floor, and workers simply ate lunch at empty consoles. Neglect and traffic took a toll. The carpet was torn, patched with duct tape, and props, like headsets and slide rules, went missing.

This rankled Eugene “Gene” Kranz, the lead flight director for the Apollo 11 moon landing and leader of the team that successfully saved the Apollo 13 crew. “Mr. Kranz always complained that his abort button was stolen,” Tetley says. “The integrity of that room was actually being lost.”

Then came a bit of serendipity. In 2013, Tetley applied for a $5,000 grant with the National Park Service Heritage Partnership Program to create a video to get visitors excited about the moon landing. Her application caught the eye of the NPS regional director, who instead commissioned a historic furnishings report, hoping it would provide a scope of the work needed to restore the MOCR back to its previous condition.

apollo mission control tour nasa

Screens show realistic displays from  July 20, 1969, the original moon landing.

The team conducted a workshop with interested parties, including Apollo flight controllers, and the idea for the restoration crystallized. “[Retired NASA flight controller] Ed Fendell came to the very first workshop in 2014, and he said, ‘We support you a hundred percent,’” Tetley recalls. “He said, ‘It needs to look like we just got up and walked away.’”

But after that, the effort stalled. Part of the logjam stemmed from a jostling for control over the project. The other part: who would foot the $5 million bill. Finally, Kranz had had enough. “He wrote what we call the nuclear letter,” Tetley says. 

Dated January 26, 2017, the letter circulated far and wide, including to NASA’s federal preservation officer and US congressional committees, and was accompanied by articles in the Houston Chronicle, with one calling the MOCR “a cathedral in ruin.” The letter finally spurred action. NASA headquarters called Johnson Space Center and told them to get it done, Tetley says.

The city of Webster, home to many of the engineers and flight control personnel employed by the Apollo program, donated $3.1 million, including a $400,000 matching fund. Space Center Houston took the lead for the matching money, launching a 30-day Kickstarter campaign called the Webster Challenge that raised $525,000. Johnson Space Center added another $1 million, and by November 2018 the project was underway. The goal was to finish the restoration by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing—nine months away in July 2019. The historic Apollo Mission Control Center actually consists of five rooms, although there’s one that everyone probably pictures first. That would be MOCR, the nexus of decision-making. During the restoration, painstaking steps were taken to identify original finishes for things like paint, wallpaper, and carpet. The team pored over archival photos, but it was the occasional lucky discovery that proved most useful.

After removing a fire extinguisher, they spotted the original wallpaper. The manufacturer still had a roll to reprint. When the consoles and P-tube stations (pneumatic tubes used to send messages between consoles) were moved, the team found the original carpet.

A contractor found and asked the production designer for the 1995 film Apollo 13 how the consoles for the set were so accurately depicted. The designer pointed the team to Cosmosphere, a space museum in Kansas with a restoration division for old tech. Additional ephemera, like mugs and a Rocket coffeepot, Skilcraft binders, even Winston, Philip Morris, Kent, and Marlboro cigarettes that controllers remembered smoking and named in oral interviews, were collected or bought intact off eBay.

apollo mission control tour nasa

Notebooks, slide rules, coffee cups—no detail was missed.

Consoles and the last remaining wall-mounted P-tube station were also restored in the Simulation Control Room, where staff prepare for flight missions. But the Recovery Operations Control Room, where NASA personnel and the navy organize recovery efforts after splashdown, is still in use. A window looking in is instead embedded with a photo of its historical version.

At the front of mission control is the Summary Display Projection Room (nicknamed the “Bat Cave” because it’s painted black), from which maps and images were projected onto the screens in the MOCR. The old tech there has been recreated and, after extensive research, the team nailed down what would have been on those screens during key moments on July 20, 1969.

Photographs of the MOCR often failed to capture the details on the screens. “When the photographers were shooting still photography in there, the mission controllers liked the room to be dark, so when they adjusted their cameras for the lighting, it caused the photos to be grainy,” says Paul Spana, director of collections and curator at Space Center Houston.

Then an archivist found 165 reels of 65mm film at the national archives. The restoration team pieced together the imagery on the MOCR screens and combined it with preserved audio for a complete experience. “It’s like putting a puzzle together,” Spana says of the completed restoration.

At the rear of MOCR, behind glass, the viewing room, where family and dignitaries watched in theater-style seating, also underwent a thorough restoration. An illuminated “Quiet Please” sign remains. Upholstery on the seats was professionally cleaned, the little pop-out ashtrays in the seat backs restored—they’re sometimes mistaken for cell phone holders by a younger generation of visitors.

Now those visitors can hear the audio chatter between the controllers and astronauts, watch the clocks tick down, and see the screens scroll with real data. For a few moments, they relive a history that is not so distant in some ways, but hard to fathom in others. “The historic control room shows you what can be done,” Tetley says. “It shows what humankind is capable of doing.”

Related Content

apollo mission control tour nasa

Slow Fashion

This Houston Fashion Designer Wants Your Clothes to Actually Last

11/28/2023 By Uvie Bikomo

apollo mission control tour nasa

Performance Grade

How Houston’s Rubén Isaza Became a Fashion Designer to the Stars

11/29/2023 By Daniel Renfrow

apollo mission control tour nasa

Made in Houston

A New Wave of Local Makers Has Arrived in Houston

12/01/2023 Edited by Emma Balter

apollo mission control tour nasa

Ring of Fire

Everything You Need to Know about the Annular Solar Eclipse

10/11/2023 By Uvie Bikomo and Geneva Diaz

apollo mission control tour nasa

NASA Logo

Suggested Searches

  • Climate Change
  • Expedition 64
  • Mars perseverance
  • SpaceX Crew-2
  • International Space Station
  • View All Topics A-Z

Humans in Space

Earth & climate, the solar system, the universe, aeronautics, learning resources, news & events.

apollo mission control tour nasa

NASA Invites You to Share Excitement of Agency’s SpaceX Crew-8 Launch

A large white balloon floats into a clear blue sky above snow covered land. Long white material attaches it to a crane holding a scientific payload in the air. It has large black solar panel squares on the sides.

GUSTO Breaks NASA Scientific Balloon Record for Days in Flight

Small plants grow in rows of small containers that are blue on the bottom and white plastic at the top. The containers sit in clear pans on either side of a divider inside a large open box and are bathed in red light

NASA’s SpaceX 30th Resupply Mission to Launch Experiments to Station

  • Search All NASA Missions
  • A to Z List of Missions
  • Upcoming Launches and Landings
  • Spaceships and Rockets
  • Communicating with Missions
  • James Webb Space Telescope
  • Hubble Space Telescope
  • Why Go to Space
  • Commercial Space
  • Destinations
  • Living in Space
  • Explore Earth Science
  • Earth, Our Planet
  • Earth Science in Action
  • Earth Multimedia
  • Earth Science Researchers
  • Pluto & Dwarf Planets
  • Asteroids, Comets & Meteors
  • The Kuiper Belt
  • The Oort Cloud
  • Skywatching
  • The Search for Life in the Universe
  • Black Holes
  • The Big Bang
  • Dark Energy & Dark Matter
  • Earth Science
  • Planetary Science
  • Astrophysics & Space Science
  • The Sun & Heliophysics
  • Biological & Physical Sciences
  • Lunar Science
  • Citizen Science
  • Astromaterials
  • Aeronautics Research
  • Human Space Travel Research
  • Science in the Air
  • NASA Aircraft
  • Flight Innovation
  • Supersonic Flight
  • Air Traffic Solutions
  • Green Aviation Tech
  • Drones & You
  • Technology Transfer & Spinoffs
  • Space Travel Technology
  • Technology Living in Space
  • Manufacturing and Materials
  • Science Instruments
  • For Kids and Students
  • For Educators
  • For Colleges and Universities
  • For Professionals
  • Science for Everyone
  • Requests for Exhibits, Artifacts, or Speakers
  • STEM Engagement at NASA
  • NASA's Impacts
  • Centers and Facilities
  • Directorates
  • Organizations
  • People of NASA
  • Internships
  • Our History
  • Doing Business with NASA
  • Get Involved
  • Aeronáutica
  • Ciencias Terrestres
  • Sistema Solar
  • All NASA News
  • Video Series on NASA+
  • Newsletters
  • Social Media
  • Media Resources
  • Upcoming Launches & Landings
  • Virtual Events
  • Sounds and Ringtones
  • Interactives
  • STEM Multimedia

apollo mission control tour nasa

NASA’s SpaceX CRS-30

NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Drew Feustel practice using an early design of the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera during the Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Test Team (JETT) Field Test 3 in Arizona.

NASA Signs Agreement with Nikon to Develop Lunar Artemis Camera

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer

Astrophysics Instruments

Astronaut Candidate Jessica Wittner

Protected: NASA Astronaut: Jessica Wittner

Astronaut Candidate Christopher Williams

Protected: NASA Astronaut: Christopher L. Williams

Astronaut Candidate Anil Menon

Protected: NASA Astronaut: Anil Menon

ROSES-2024 A.42 Earth Action: Disaster Risk Reduction, Recovery, and Resilience Updates, FAQ, and Telecon Information

ROSES-2024 A.42 Earth Action: Disaster Risk Reduction, Recovery, and Resilience Updates, FAQ, and Telecon Information

Earth Day

ROSES-2024 Amendment 1: A.47 Earth Action: Wildland Fires Final Text and Due Dates.

The day before asteroid 2008 OS7 made its close approach with Earth on Feb. 2, this series of images was captured by the powerful 230-foot (70-meter) Goldstone Solar System Radar antenna near Barstow, California.

NASA’s Planetary Radar Images Slowly Spinning Asteroid

Juan Pablo León

Juan Pablo León

grayscale image of Moon's rocky surface from above, with a small white dot at the center of the frame: IM-1 lander, location indicated with white arrow

NASA’s LRO Images Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus Lander

This wide-field composite image was made with X-ray (blue/ROSAT & Chandra), radio (green/Very Large Array), and optical (red/Digitized Sky Survey) observations of the supernova remnant, IC 443. The pullout, also a composite with a Chandra X-ray close-up, shows a neutron star that is spewing out a comet-like wake of high-energy particles as it races through space. Based on an analysis of the swept-back shape of the wake, astronomers deduced that the neutron star is located in the multimillion degree Celsius gas in the remnant. The direction of the wake is puzzling since it should point back toward the center of the remnant. A possible explanation is that it is being pushed aside by fast-moving gusts of gas in the remnant, much like cometary tails are pushed away by the solar wind.

Listen to the Universe: New NASA Sonifications and Documentary

Universe Stories

Universe Stories

Observatories

Observatories

Citizen Science in NASA’s Planetary Science Division

Citizen Science in NASA’s Planetary Science Division

Dream with Us graphic, showing a female African American dreaming up aeronautics ideas.

2024 Dream with Us Design Challenge

A man sets up recording equipment and a solar panel in the California desert.

NASA Instruments Will Listen for Supersonic X-59’s Quiet ‘Thump’

Two images - Left, Diana Acosta holding her daughter in front of the cab of NASA's Vertical Motion Simulator. Right, Diana Acosta with her daughter inside the control deck of the Vertical Motion Simulator.

Math, Mentorship, Motherhood: Behind the Scenes with NASA Engineers

Radioisotope Power Systems Resources

Radioisotope Power Systems Resources

Girl in a wheelchair with a laptop display on a mount

Seeing is Communicating

A college student works on a student created rocket with safety glasses on her face.

Former Student Launch Competitor Turns Experience into NASA Engineering Career

Enhancing Engagement: Strategies for STEM Professionals to Encourage Youth to Consider STEM Careers

Enhancing Engagement: Strategies for STEM Professionals to Encourage Youth to Consider STEM Careers

This is a photo of Brittny McGraw, News Chief in the Office of Communications at NASA’s Langley Research Center. She joined NASA Langley in September 2023, after a 20-year career as an award-winning broadcast journalist. Brittny is wearing a blue dress and is standing in front of the large welcome sign at NASA Langley Research Center, which features a 3-D sculpture of the NASA logo. Trees can be seen in the background of the image.

Langley Celebrates Black History Month: Brittny McGraw

Become a SunSketcher, and Help Measure the Shape of the Sun!

Become a SunSketcher, and Help Measure the Shape of the Sun!

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio uses a tool in his right hand as he activates a space biology experiment that is studying how weightlessness affects genetic expression in microbes.

Ciencia destacada del año en el espacio del astronauta Frank Rubio

Frank Rubio, un hombre de pelo y ojos oscuros y con lentes, sonríe y tiene los brazos cruzados. Va vestido con un polo oscuro y pantalones khaki. Detrás suyo se ve la atmósfera de la Tierra a través de las ventanas de observación de la cúpula.

Misión récord de astronauta ayuda a planificar viajes al espacio profundo

monnikin

Pruebas de la NASA con maniquí de Artemis I aportan información para futuras misiones tripuladas

Restoring the apollo mission control center.

Sandra Tetley and Adam Graves discuss the journey of restoring the historic Apollo Mission Control Center to look and feel exactly as it did in July 1969 during the moments before, during, and after the moon landing. Ben Feist then focuses on the cleanup of the audio tapes for the restoration project. HWHAP Episode 96.

Restoring Apollo MCC

Listen to the Podcast

Restoring Apollo MCC

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, the home of human spaceflight, stationed in Houston, Texas. We bring space right to you! On this podcast, you’ll learn from some of the brightest minds of America’s space agency as they discuss topics in engineering, science, technology and more. You’ll hear firsthand from astronauts what it’s like to launch atop a rocket, live in space and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. And you’ll listen in to the more human side of space as our guests tell stories of behind-the-scenes moments never heard before.

For Episode 96 Sandra Tetley and Adam Graves discuss the journey of restoring the historic Apollo Mission Control Center to look and feel exactly as it did in July 1969 during the moments before, during, and after the moon landing. Ben Feist then focuses on the cleanup of the audio tapes for the restoration project. These podcast interviews were recorded on April 3, 2019 and May 6, 2019.

For more of our Apollo Podcasts check out the “ Houston We Have a Podcast: Apollo 50th Anniversary ” webpage!

Houston, we have a podcast

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official Podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 96, Restoring the Apollo Mission Control Center. I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts all to let you know the coolest information about what’s going on right here at NASA. So if you’re following along with our episodes you’ll know that we’ve been revisiting some of the historic Apollo missions in celebration of their 50th anniversaries. And we’re coming up on a big one, the 50th anniversary of the mission that put the boots of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon. There’s a lot of work being done in celebration of this anniversary. And today we’re going to be discussing one of the more ambitious projects, restoring the historic Apollo Mission Control Center. This includes the mission operations control room 2 more commonly known here as MOCR- 2, the visitor’s viewing room and the simulation control room and the room called the bat cave, super cool, and we’ll get into what that is. Many human space flight missions were controlled out of this center, most of the Gemini and Apollo missions including Apollo 11, the first landing of humans on the moon. The building where all of these live within the Johnson Space Center is called Building 30 which was given national historic landmark status in 1985. It’s been toured over the years, hundreds of people walking in and out. And through that came more wear and tear on this national icon. Soon it just wasn’t the same as it used to be. Now we’re nearing the end of a project spanning six years to restore this historic landmark to look exactly as it did in July 1969 capturing the essence of what it was like five decades ago during some of the greatest moments in human space exploration. Today we’ll be talking more in depth about the journey thus far to restore this historic landmark with Sandra Tetley and Adam Graves. Sandra is a Historic Preservation Officer and Real Property Officer here at the Johnson Space Center. And Adam is the lead for the project based with the company GRAVitate. These folks are at the forefront of this monumental project set to be complete later this month. A big part of this project is allowing visitors to experience a moment in Apollo history not only by being able to see this restored setting but by playing audio from Apollo 11 that had been recently digitized. Houston, We Have a Podcast host Pat Ryan takes over towards the end of this episode to chat with Ben Feist, a web developer among other things who helped process this recently recovered audio from Apollo Mission Control and bring it to life as part of this experience. And this is a very exciting topic so let’s jump right into it with Mrs. Sandra Tetley and Dr. Adam Graves first, and then wrap up with Pat’s conversation with Ben Feist. Enjoy.

Host: Sandra and Adam, thank you so much for coming on to talk about this great project that’s happening with the Apollo Mission Control Center.

Sandra Tetley: Right, thank you for having us. We’re excited.

Adam Graves: We really appreciate it.

Host: So we’re in the final stretch of this ambitious project being set to complete later this month. We’re aiming for June, hopefully that sticks. How are you guys feeling right now in the home stretch?

Sandra Tetley: Pretty good. We’re on schedule. There’s a few things that have come up, just little things, coordination mainly. But we’re feeling good, we’re excited. It’s starting to come together.

Host: And with a project thing long, we’re talking six years, this is very exciting for this to all come together. Of course there’s going to be things along the way that change, but this is very cool. I wanted to start by taking it all the way back really six years ago. How did this all start? When did we start really considering let’s restore this historic landmark?

Sandra Tetley: So back in March of 2013 I applied for a grant with the National Park Service Heritage Program. And that’s because Building 30 is a national historic landmark. And so what I applied for was $5,000 to do some sort of video or something for the visitors to kind of experience the moon landing. And the Regional Director of the Park Service called me and was very interested in the project. And so they came down and talked to me, and we showed them the Mission Control in its state of disrepair. And so they offered me $20,000 to do a historic furnishings report. And then they would put in the other $20,000. And so they had it commissioned. And what that is, a historic furnishings report is a very in depth, detailed analysis of the Mission Control Center from what it should have been or what it was to how it would — everything we would need to do to restore it. And so from there we held a workshop with the Park Service to kind of bring in the stakeholders, and that was the beginning of it. They felt very strongly that it is of such world importance as a historical site that they felt very strongly that we needed to restore it. So that’s how it started.

Host: And it definitely is because let’s go right into that. What was the condition? What were we looking at? What were the rooms and the elements that we were looking at before we even started restoring it?

Apollo Mission Control Room

Sandra Tetley: So the room — about in the mid 90s after they moved to Building 30 South the room was just unoccupied. The consoles were not lit up or anything. There was nothing on the consoles, no documents or anything. And it was open to whoever could get into 30 could go and sit at the consoles and dial the phones, press the buttons, you know, do whatever they wanted to. Visitors from Space Center Houston went in the viewing room, and then level 9 tours and VIP tours would go on the floor. And so it was not really ever maintained as far as upkeep. The did do some maintenance when chairs would break or something like that. But it was really not kept in any sort of fashion that it should have been.

Host: Yeah, it was kind of just people can go in and do whatever they wanted it. But it wasn’t really treated as a important place in history.

Sandra Tetley: Right.

Host: And that’s where this kind of came in. Because we want this to look and feel and be treated as an important place in history, right. So when you’re talking about this room, people coming in and touching, what is the room?

Sandra Tetley: So the room we call it the Apollo Mission Control Center. There’s actually two Mission Control Centers, MOCR-1 which is on the second floor, and then MOCR-2 was on the third floor. So the Mission Control Center includes the MOCR which is the Mission Operations Control Room. That’s the room with the consoles. Then the visitors viewing room or VIP room which was the seating that was behind the room and had the big glass windows so the family members and dignitaries would sit in there and watch what was going on in the MOCR. Then the simulation control room which is where the simulators would be, and they’re the ones that when they would test and do simulations, they were the ones that would send them all the error messages and all the problems, and so that was the simulation room. And then the bat cave is actually the room behind the large summary display screens that included all of the projectors and the timing systems and the clocks at the very top. And so we call that the bat cave because it’s all black. And so those four rooms are what we term the Mission Control Center.

Host: Okay, the least attractive room visually is the coolest sounding one, the bat cave.

Sandra Tetley: It is cool.

Host: All right, so those are all the elements to really capture this part of history. And these were all the things that you were looking at. Now obviously we’re years into the project. All the proposals, the written, the things you wrote down of here’s what we want to address, those started to happen. Talk about that process where we went from a proposal, what do we need to fix, to let’s start restoring this Apollo Control Center.

Sandra Tetley: Yeah, it didn’t work quite that easily.

Host: Of course, of course.

Sandra Tetley: Yeah. So, there was a lot of stakeholders that wanted to control the project and from Flight Operations to External Relations, Space Center Houston. And so as a national historic landmark, in order to restore the national historic landmark, it needs to be done under the Secretary of the Interior standards for restoration. And so, of course, none of those people have those qualifications. So I pushed to make sure it got under my contract, and that’s where Adam comes in. And so we did a lot of work on — the historic furnishings report gave us the basis, and from that they did the in depth research that we needed to do. And you want to go into that and tell them all that?

Adam Graves: Yeah, of course. So, you’re right, the historic furnishings report really laid that foundation for just kind of initial assessment. I know when I went in the very first time you get goose bumps, and you know, I’m there on a job so, okay, I’ve got to get over all of this and start looking around and look at the condition. And it was pretty rough. So thank goodness we have the furnishings report to start from. But then you start identifying some of the holes in that furnishings report, looking around at some of the materials that have been replaced over time. And then we hit the libraries and the archives and the photographs and the videos and get all of this information. And then we did interviews with how many?

Flight Controller Interviews

Sandra Tetley: I think there was about 25.

Adam Graves: Twenty five flight controllers we did interviews with in the room and learned what they did and what buttons on the consoles were lit the most or they interacted with most. Then we take what they say even about lighting in the room, you know, what was the overall sense of lighting, was it dark or was it light, all these specific details so that we can reconstruct that when we get to that point. At that point we weren’t sure are we even going to be funded to do this work. We just know there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. And there’s a lot of details that have to go back to the original because, you know, that room was used after Apollo and through shuttle or for a few missions in shuttle and like that. So we had to kind of go backwards in time and also verify some of the things that the flight controllers. Recollection is different from reality in some cases. So where we could we used photographs and videos. And where we couldn’t the interviews came in really handy. So we had just extensive, extensive research to get all that done.

Host: Yeah, really this report was capturing what was wrong, what were some of the things you need to fix, what has changed over time. Because like you said the room was in use until the early 90s or mid 90s.

Sandra Tetley: Mid 90s.

Host: Mid 90s. So things obviously change over time. But really trying to get a sense of what it was like. And correct me if I’m wrong, you’re restoring it back to the Apollo era.

Sandra Tetley: Yes.

Host: To what it looked like in the Apollo era. That’s the idea. Those are the interviews, the images that you really want to capture, what did it look like in the 60s.

Adam Graves: That’s exactly right. Yeah, we’re looking to actually even more specific, Apollo 11 during landing and the EVA and recovery. So we want everything to be specific to that, even that shorter time period. Of course, the consoles we’re doing those Apollo 15 configuration. And the lighting on the buttons and the monitors and everything is — we were shooting for Apollo 15 as that’s a piece of history that we wanted to preserve. The flight controllers indicated that was a very important time for technology in the room during the Apollo area. So this was the height of the technology of Apollo and wanted to preserve some of that. So the consoles will be a little bit different in terms of the Apollo era, but everything else is 11. What’s on the console itself is 11. What’s the screens it’s 11. Everything, lighting levels, everything.

Host: Yeah, you get a feel for it. But it sounds like what the flight controllers even wanted was even during Apollo 11 there was still some work to be done to get to the level that they wanted, that peak of technology during Apollo 15. And yes, I can understand why they would want that to be highlighted. But the moment itself being Apollo 11 obviously one of the biggest moments in human history.

Adam Graves: Exactly.

Host: So, yeah, you want those on the screens.

Sandra Tetley: Exactly.

Host: All right, so how about this process that you’re talking about of tracking all of the changes over time, of what needs to be updated, of these interviews, these photos, how long did that process take?

Adam Graves: Well, in some ways it’s still ongoing.

Adam Graves: We learn something new almost every day. Someone will come out of the woodwork that used to work here and says, oh, I have this or here’s a document that maybe you’ve never seen before. So really since the beginning to present day. And I imagine for the next couple months even we’ll still see some last minute things that really could add to the experience.

Host: Okay. So then what about to actually start restoring things. Now you’ve identified some things. We want the consoles to be Apollo 15, you want these on the screens. So what about actually getting these pieces, these historic pieces to the moment in history that you want to get them to? Where do you go? Where do all these pieces go?

Sandra Tetley: So Adam put together an excellent team basically. And we went out now — and the console sort of is an interesting story because somebody had referred them to me to review the consoles when we were kind of first gathering and getting things going. And then also you’ll have to tell him your story. So we selected them because they have expertise. They have actual Apollo era consoles from MOCR-1.

Host: This is the Kansas Cosmosphere?

Sandra Tetley: Right, Kansas Cosmosphere.

Host: Okay, okay.

Sandra Tetley: And so they are very familiar with it, and they know — they’re familiar with the details and the design, and they have the expertise to restore those. So they were chosen to restore all of the consoles. And so they’ve taken them up to Kansas to their shop, and they’ve been working on them for over a year now. And so they’re expected to come back. But you can tell him your story.

MCC Apollo 13

Adam Graves: Yeah, so their heading down the right path of how do we move from this research and get more research and get the right people involved? We had to put a team together. Not one person is big enough or smart enough to figure this monster out. So, yeah, she had heard of the Cosmosphere but I hadn’t. And I had some ideas of some of the experts that might be, you know, we might reach out to for this project. But I got to thinking one day, I think I just woke up with this idea like, okay, I’ve seen the Apollo 13 movie, and I know I’ve seen in that movie a Mission Control Room. So how did they build this? And so I went to the movie and I looked through all the credits, and I find the art designer, the production designer and I contact him. I start looking on the internet. I’m like, okay, how am I going to get in touch with this Michael Corenblith guy? And so I looked for an agent page and that came up with nothing. And I was like, okay, maybe he’s on Facebook. So I went on Facebook and he was. I found the guy and I sent him a Facebook message, and the next day he responded. And he’s like this is great that you’re doing this. And I’d be happy to help if I can, but I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since the Apollo 13 movie, but this is amazing. But he indicated that he had used the Cosmosphere to build some of those consoles. So I was like, all right, great, now I can go hunt this out. So that was one part of the team for the consoles. And then we have this big amazing room full of other things that aren’t consoles.

Host: Right.

Adam Graves: I just knew putting this team together that it was important that I used people in Texas to get this work done, local people that everyone has a story from Houston that involves Johnson Space Center. So I reached out to the historic societies in Dallas and Austin and San Antonio and Houston, and had conversations with a lot of these folks that have done the historic courthouses in Texas. Which was in a way with the materials, the carpets, the wallpapers, things like that, things that I knew were kind of similar just started vetting through those list of people and finally found the Stern and Bucek team here in Houston that has done a lot of that work. So we got with them. And they have a number of subcontractors as well that kind of rounded out the rest of the team.

Host: Okay, wow, all right. So that’s a ton of research. I’m trying to get my mind around all of the different elements that need to come together. Just the Cosmosphere you said was the consoles. Then you’ve got all these other components. You’ve got the rooms. You’re talking windows, ceilings, floors, carpets.

Adam Graves: And we’re talking carpenters and painters and all sorts of things here that have experience doing historic preservation work.

Adam Graves: Which is even trickier.

Host: In Texas, right?

Adam Graves: Yes

Host: You’ve got all these different like requirements and things you want to do. So when did this process start? You’re searching for all the right people to do it. Now you’re in the middle of let’s go and actually restore some of these elements. When did this start?

Sandra Tetley: Well, the actual work didn’t even start until October of 2018.

Host: Oh, wow, very recently.

Sandra Tetley: Oh, yeah. I mean because of the funding and because of all the politics involved we took an 18 month project, we estimate 18 to 24 months, and we’re cramming it into that nine months. And we are really literally cramming. But like Adam said it’s been real interesting. We can tell you the story of the carpet and the wallpaper which are probably — and the ceiling tiles — probably the most interesting stories that we have.

Host: Please.

Sandra Tetley: When we were doing research on the carpet we didn’t know — it had already been re-carpeted and re-wallpapered. So we didn’t have any records of what it was or any of that. We could go back and we could look at some of the original designs, but it’s difficult to tell what exactly it was. But we were looking under a P tube station, and the P tube stations are the ones that have the pipes under the floor, and they had not been moved when they re-carpeted. And so the original carpet was under the P tube station. So they were able to cut a piece out, and it was what’s called woven carpet which they don’t do anymore. But they took it to the carpet people, not Mohawk, Shaw Carpet, it was Shaw Carpet, and they took their current tufted way that they do carpet and analyzed the colors and analyzed the pattern. And by adding an addition yarn into their current method of weaving — of creating carpet they were able to recreate the carpet. And they went through about 15 to 20 different ways that they did it in order to get it with the pattern and the texture that we wanted. And so that was really cool to do that. And when you look at them it’s just remarkable what they’ve done. So the same thing with the wallpaper. We were in there one day, and the finishes guy noticed that they had removed a fire extinguisher off the wall. And behind that fire extinguisher was the original wallpaper. So by going back to the original plans they found the original manufacturer of the wallpaper. They went back to that company which had been purchased. They went back to the purchased company. They actually found the roller in their warehouse, and they were able to use that roller. It had been retooled, so our current recreated wallpaper has a greater definition than what was on the walls, but it’s just remarkable. And so they were able to recreate it after about 15, 20 tries of getting the color and the pattern because it’s a two colored method. And that wallpaper has been recreated in the MOCR. So it’s really cool. And the ceiling tile same thing. They found a piece of ceiling tile in one of the old phone booths in the lobby of 30. And so they were able to go back and get a piece of Armstrong tile. But they had to hand stamp the whole pattern on each of those tiles. It took four different stamps, four different ways to hand stamp. So that’s the level of detail that they’re going to. I mean it will be remarkably — it will look just like it did in 1969.

Host: And the places you’re finding these elements are astounding. You don’t just go to the floor and look at the carpet and be like, all right, let’s match this. You’re finding it in the weirdest places.

Sandra Tetley: Right, right. It’s a little bit of the hand of the Lord to find these little details. But that really will make it great. Because whereas before we were just going to use the same wallpaper and then recreate the carpet from what the flight controllers were telling us. And so this now we have no doubt. It’s going to be just a recreation of the original.

Host: So a lot of it, it seems like the restoration project really is getting everything with the original carpeting, this is what the carpeting was, this is what the wallpaper was. The consoles are a little bit different, Apollo 15 era. But it’s really getting all these different elements together to make sure that history is captured. But you also talked about another part which was you want the screens to show Apollo 11, what they would look like with Apollo 11. So not only are you talking about getting materials, but you’re talking about getting information now from Apollo 11. So where did you go to find that?

Sandra Tetley: So that’s Adam’s forte.

Adam Graves: Well, it’s been a difficult process because we’re really trying to hone in a few different events during descent and landing on the moon, during the EVA, during recovery. Those sorts of things, the video and camera work that was done in the MOCR was interested in the people that were in Mission Control. Which ultimately that’s what we’re trying to get through our project as well is highlight the men that worked in this room. So there’s so much that we’re missing from those time periods because there’s not just a camera locked on the screens, right? So we have to look at video and say, oh, that camera just moved across the screen, let’s pause it and see if we can figure out what that is. And it’s dark or blurry or whatever. And so just a ton of research to try to piece these little pieces of photograph and camera together to, okay, during descent and landing what’s on screen 1, what’s on screen 2, what’s on screen 3, and just piecing all that together. And now we know.

Sandra Tetley: And even the clock. So what was on the clocks have to match on the screens, what was on the consoles.

Adam Graves: Right. And we’re not talking just still imagery of something on a screen that we’re going to be presenting. It’s going to be working.

Sandra Tetley: Moving.

Adam Graves: So there will be a large map on the middle screen, and you’ll see the CM moving across the screen. And it’s timed up with the clocks that are above it with the GET times and things like that. So it’s not just going to be a picture, a still picture. It’s going to be a real living room.

Host: Yeah, you’re not capturing a moment in history. You’re capturing a length of time. And all this data has to synchronize. The clocks have to match where the CM, the command module was at this time.

Adam Graves: That’s exactly right.

Host: Oh, wow.

Adam Graves: And even in the viewing room we have 1960 TVs that we’re retrofitting, and they’ll be playing CBS footage in the viewing room. That’s also timed to landing and EVA and things like that.

Host: Right, and this is actually an important thing. Because when we go back to before the restoration project, what the Apollo Mission Control Center really looked like, I mean there wasn’t really — you had some B roll playing on the screens up front, but really there was nothing on the actual monitors of the consoles, the buttons were not lighting up. It was just left. It was just left there.

Sandra Tetley: Right, there was no audio. We’re going to have audio. So we’ll have everything synced up. So when you walk into the viewing room you’re going to think you’re back on July 20, 1969. That’s our goal.

Host: Oh, that’s wonderful.

Adam Graves: Exactly the sights and sounds that were on that day.

Apollo 13 mirror

Host: Now some of the things I really loved because I used to give tours of the Apollo Mission Control, that was actually one of my first intern jobs. And then my first like real job when I came on was giving the tour and capturing these historic even artifacts within the room. And there’s some that I always loved to highlight. They had a mirror from the Apollo 13 mission that the crew presented to the flight controllers saying it reflects the true heroes of this mission, really the controllers on the ground working through all different scenarios to rescue the crew.

Adam Graves: They are coming back. And it’s important to us for the restoration to preserve everything that we can that was in the room through shuttle and Apollo and all this. We say we make new carpet or make new wallpaper. That’s true, that’s a lot of it. But we’ve also preserved in place some of those elements as well that we could. And the consoles are not being repainted. They still show history. There’s still some rubs on them. We’ve preserved them, we have wax and they look nicer but the history is still there. So that’s the goal throughout. And so the plaques you talk about they’ll be back in there. When you look on the wall you can hold up a picture and see a Apollo 11 picture. And on the wall the plaques that should be there are there in their appropriate locations. But down the hallway in another location are the proclamations, and there will be the shuttle plaques and things like that that belong in that room.

Host: Wow. Okay, I’m very excited. I actually can’t wait to step foot in there. And actually that’s a good segue into the next part was you mentioned when you actually walk into the room you’re going to be living this moment through history. What will it look like whenever the room is ready and people can start viewing it? Because, you know, like one of the things that were happening before, as you mentioned Sandra, was people could just walk in and do whatever they want. What’s going to happen after this restoring project?

Sandra Tetley: So the best place to view the Mission Control Center will be from the visitor’s viewing room. So the plan is to have everyone, even employees, to go up the visitor’s lobby and the visitor’s staircase into that alcove that goes into the back of the viewing room. And then when you step into there you will be stepping back into time. And then the seating, we’ll have the best seating because we’re going to have the clocks working, and the summary display screens will be working. So sitting in those seats will give you the best view of everything happening. And when you walk in you’ll hear the chatter from the flight controllers and the command module and the astronauts. And you’ll be hearing all that as we begin to count down. And then when the show starts at some point, like a docent or whatever or just an employee, when the show starts then we’ll begin at the descent and landing, and then we’re going to land and you’ll experience all that. And a very important part that we’re continuing to fight even right now is that during that landing and landing on the moon there was no video at all. The only thing the flight controllers had to look at was what was on the screen, their screens on their consoles, and then what was being shown through the computer where the lander was. So that’s a very important historical element that we’re trying to show is that these men landed on the moon just given this data, even with the alarms going off and all that, they were landing, so you’re going to hear that and you’re going to see that. And then from that after they land we’ll go to the first steps and we’ll walk through the first steps. And then we’re going to do where Nixon called the moon from the White House. And a lot of people don’t even know that that really happened. But he called them after planting the flag and so they’re standing there with the flag. And then we’ll cover when they’re on the Hornet coming back. And one of the cool — tell them about the upside down camera. That’s a great story.

Adam Graves: Oh, yeah. So on the very rightmost screen if you’re sitting in the visitor’s viewing room which is also restored and restored seating and ash trays in the front, you’ll be in history in there as well. So you’ll look and see when the very first video appears in Mission Control after landing, Neil Armstrong is coming down the ladder. And it turns out that that video is upside down. So there’s a little bit of communication here, a little bit of chatter as you’re experiencing this to flip the view, the vision, of the screen upside down or right side up, sorry.

Sandra Tetley: Yeah, it’s very cool. Because you’re watching it and then the flight controllers are going your image is upside down. And so then they flip it right side up. And so we’re going to show that, and then you begin to see it. It clears up a little bit because it goes from one satellite to another. And then it clears up, and then you see him step on the moon. So those little elements like that that people may not remember or may not have experienced, you know, if they were young, those are really cool elements. Because it shows — we’re really trying to focus on the flight controllers and what they did as far as the mission. Not just astronauts which we always hear. And so those are really cool elements that we’ll be able to show in the visitor experience.

Host: Wow. So it’s not only restoring all these elements and making it look and feel like it did in the 60s. Now you’re adding this show really. You get to sit down and experience it. Is it an ever-looping sort of thing? Is that how it’s going to be? Or is it you sit down and press play and live this moment through this moment?

Sandra Tetley: Right, you sit down and press play.

Host: I see.

Sandra Tetley: Yeah, it won’t be going all the time. It will be set to where if you go in with a group you can get it to start. And then it goes through the whole thing until recovery. And then the mission accomplished where they celebrated in the MOCR. And then it will reset back to a time that, you know, people can take pictures, and it will stay at that static state. Then it will recycle. We have a very sophisticated show controller. It’s going to be very cool, yeah.

Host: [Laughs] I want to be one of the first to do it.

Sandra Tetley: And even the lights, the lights are going to change to the way they were. And the quiet sign, the quiet please sign will come on. It’s going to be just like you’re there is what our goal is.

Host: Wow. How did all these elements come together?

Sandra Tetley: Lots of experts.

Host: I was going to say —

Sandra Tetley: Oh, a lot of experts.

Host: Yeah, you must have — I mean this was part of your research then, right?

Adam Graves: Yes, my research and the other teammates’ research and visiting the room over and over and over again and finding this detail and that detail. And discussing it with other experts and discussing it with flight controllers. It’s just a lot of work.

Sandra Tetley: A lot of photos, a lot of video.

Adam Graves: A lot of photos, yeah. It’s so funny when someone shows me a photo now I’m just like, oh yeah, I have seen that one before. Thank you. I haven’t been hit up for a new one lately. It’s been a while since someone said, hey, have you seen this, and I’ve said, no actually, where did that come from?

Viewing room

Host: It’s probably all you dream about anymore, just for how much you think about it it’s just in your dreams now, all these different details. So this was actually a good point you brought up was the visitor’s viewing room seats are going to be restored. That’s actually part of the project. So not only are you going to sit and be able to experience what’s in front of you but exist in a part of history as well —

Host: — with the quiet please signs coming up and everything.

Host: You mentioned other rooms, too. There’s the bat cave which I thought was a super cool name, and then the simulation control room. Are those viewable from the room? How are those being restored and how can you access those?

Adam Graves: Yeah, the sim control room is actually a neat one. We were able to — we discussed among the group, and since we really are creating this live experience in the MOCR itself, we wanted to present more of a preserve in place like exactly what it — artifacts in the sim control room. So the consoles there everything, all the elements, all the components, the monitors, everything are being Apollo era stuff, like the real things that we put back together in their original locations. It’s not lit, it’s the actual artifacts. So everything in there is very unique to that time period. It’s just a little capsule in that room. And you will be able to see that room from the visitor viewing area through the window. I think when we started this project there was a curtain and things like that —

Host: Right, I remember the curtain.

Adam Graves: — in the way so you couldn’t really —

Sandra Tetley: It’s the room behind the curtain.

Adam Graves: Yeah, it’s the room behind the curtain. So you’ll be able to see, it will be open, lit, and the lighting will be lit so you can see the consoles in there.

Sandra Tetley: And we also are doing a little remembrance, I guess, of the recovery operations control room. So those are the other two windows that are painted out. We’re going to put glass that has imbedded in it photographs of it. When you walk by or when you see it, you can see it also from the viewing room, that you’ll look like you’re looking into the recovery room. Because it was not just the flight controllers by themselves. They each had a big back room. And so by showing off the sim control room and the ROCR that is representative of the back room and all the other people that may not have been at a console but it was all the support people. And so it was important for us to tell those stories as well.

Host: Right, it was bigger than just what you’re seeing in front of you in that room. There was all kinds of support. And that still exists for Mission Control even today. You can come and look at the International Space Station flight control room and, yes, there’s everyone looking at all these different elements, but they have back rooms as well. They still have that support. You’ve still got the simulations in other rooms. So it’s very much still a part of the flight operations culture even today.

Sandra Tetley: Mm-hm.

Adam Graves: Yeah, so the bat cave, also the summary display projection room is the official name —

Adam Graves: It’s not the fun name.

Host: We can use it.

Adam Graves: Yeah, we’ll go bat cave. There’s a lot of bat jokes we can do there. But, yeah, that room is actually going to be a little bit of a museum. We’re going to move some of the old large artifacts that were in there, cabinets and the Eidophor projectors and things like that that used to be in the room that did all the work. They’re not as elegant as some of the other things that we’re doing. But we have those things. We’re cleaning them, we’re putting them back in place right where they were. So if the time ever came that anyone could ever go back there and look around they would see some of those original elements to the room.

Sandra Tetley: The mirrors are still there, all but one.

Adam Graves: The mirrors are still there. Yeah, the projection system that we’re installing will actually use the same methods that the old Eidophors did, where we’re projecting off of those large mirrors onto the screens and backlighting the screens. And those new cameras, new projectors will be in the same location as the old Eidophors and like that. So it’s all going to be set up exactly how it was, just with some new technology back there.

Host: Okay, yeah. So you’re not getting the old style I guess projector, you’re updating it a little bit. But the technique that a lot of the mirrors and capabilities of the bat cave will be preserved.

Host: Will that be accessible by museum tour or just something you could do here if…?

Sandra Tetley: No, it’s not accessible at this point.

Sandra Tetley: We kind of ultimately we’d like to make it like an engineering tour to see how it all works because it really was state of the art at the time. And so, but the lights of the projectors are so strong that it presents a safety issue if you go back there when they’re lit. So we haven’t figured that out yet. But ultimately we would like it to be on tour. Because it will have the original Eidophors and the huge equipment racks that supported all the projectors and the slide projector that was the glass and silver slides that would project. So it will be cool, but right now it’s not on tour.

Adam Graves: We’ll have a special tour for your very high level nerds that like that kind of thing.

Host: See, I don’t even consider myself a high level nerd, but I am super interested in this bat cave.

Sandra Tetley: It’s going to be very cool.

Apollo Consoles

Host: Yeah, it looks awesome. I’m excited because it seems like this is all coming together. Now we are recording this now in April. Tell me now what you have done so far to this point and what still needs to be accomplished over these next few months until June. Because it sounds like this is a tight, tight —

Adam Graves: We got a late start unfortunately.

Adam Graves: It would have been nice to have those full six years.

Host: Yeah.

Sandra Tetley: Right. So, let’s see, we have done — all the wallpaper’s been put up and all the painting has been done. The painting was interesting. They actually uncovered the original column markers that were hand painted so those have been restored. What was original paint has just been cleaned. What was not original has been color matched and painted. The seating is up in Plano where it’s all being restored. And original upholstery will be reused, just cleaned. It was filthy and it’s been remarkably cleaned. And they took us off of technical power in Building 30, and so the entire — all the rooms had to be completely rewired, and that was our longest lead time. And that took almost — well, they’re still finishing up right now so it’s about four months of work. And then we put in over 16,000 feet of land cabling so we could hook everything together. So what’s next is the timing clock screens are now being put in their new frames and so they’ll be put back in. They’re going to clean the summary display screens. Carpeting is probably our next big thing. And that’s going to really make the room — it’s going to change the room. It will really be cool. And then from there when the consoles come back in the first part of June then from there then all of the artifacts and furnishings and everything will begin to be put in. And we’re going to start testing the projector systems in May so that we make sure all that’s working and get all the content going and the clocks and all that. So it will start lighting up in May, so yeah.

Host: Okay. Wow.

Adam Graves: Some of that projection is being tested right now, just not in place.

Host: So, once everything does come into place I’m imagining you’re taking me back to this moment in July of 1969. The room itself, 1969 was a different time. I’m imagining you said ash trays in the viewing room. I’m imaging ash trays on the console, papers scattered all over. Are those all coming back, too?

Sandra Tetley: Yes, everything.

Host: Oh, that’s awesome.

Flight Controller MCC

Sandra Tetley: I’m collecting the old black SKILCRAFT cross binders. I’m collecting those and those will have papers put in them. They’re recreating maps that will be put on there. We’re getting old coats and jackets that used to hang in the little coat racks.

Adam Graves: Yeah, we’ve got a number of donated items that we’re making copies of to pile on the desk. You look at the photos and videos of the room and it’s just a big messy pile of papers for the most part. But interestingly enough we know what a lot of those papers are. So we’re getting those and putting them back. And yeah, the ash trays, and actually we’re doing some vacuuming under the floor today, and they’re like there’s cigarette butts and there’s a whole cigarette pack and these things that we can use to put in place so it’s really fun.

Sandra Tetley: And our contractor that’s doing the furnishings is using eBay a lot. I mean they’re being very successful on eBay as far as cups and lighters. And they even found the rocket coffee pot that was new in the box and so we have that now. So that’s great technology that we’re able to utilize in getting all of these things that will be on the consoles.

Adam Graves: Yeah, it’s really amazing because 10 or 15 years ago if you were doing this restoration project it would be a real hassle to try to come up with some of these items. And thank goodness for eBay now and things have changed.

Host: Yeah, just easy access to find, you know, “historic cup still in the box,” boom, there it is.

Sandra Tetley: Right. [Laughs]

Host: Internet is fantastic. I just want to take this moment actually to thank you for coming on the podcast right now because it sounds like you’re right in the middle of a ton of work, and yet you have decided that it is worth an hour to spend here talking about it. But I really appreciate, A, everything you’re doing for the restoration project but, B, your time today. So that’s actually I think a perfect place to end. Thank you so much for coming on.

Sandra Tetley: Thank you for having us.

Adam Graves: Thank you so much.

Host: And describing this project in detail. I think it really captures just the amount of work and effort and research especially that goes into capturing this moment of history. It’s going to be spectacular when it’s open to the public and we can’t wait.

Sandra Tetley: Yeah, I can’t wait for you to see it and hear what you think.

Host: Thank you. I’m going to be the first one there.

Sandra Tetley: Good.

Pat Ryan: Near the end of Gary’s talk with Sandra Tetley and Adam, Graves, they discussed how visitors will be able to go the viewing room of the restored Apollo Mission Control Center and go back in time to see and hear what happened out on that main floor during the historic events of Apollo 11. It’s a real nice immersive experience. They didn’t talk much about where that audio came from or how it’s been prepared to be part of this show. But I’m going to right now with Ben Feist. He’s a web developer by day with his hands in a number of other online and media projects including cleaning up the quality of the Apollo 11 Mission Control Center audio.

Ben, how does a web developer in Canada get involved processing audio from space missions from 50 years ago?

Ben Feist: That’s a very good question that I ask myself very often. I think it’s really because I’m interested in the history of Apollo. And I spent a lot of time from about 2009 until now helping to bring the Apollo missions back to life through real time web experiences. And I’ve built a website called Apollo17.org which replays that mission in real time from beginning to end, all 302 hours of it.

Pat Ryan: Wow.

Ben Feist: And that have many different branches coming off it, one of which is eventually finding myself on the team that’s helping to restore the Apollo Mission Control room.

Pat Ryan: Before we get to that, tell me about how you got involved in audio processing at all, your technical background that got you the skills to do this work.

Ben Feist: Well, I’m by no means an audio engineer. I — it was out of necessity I basically got ahold of the Apollo 11 30 track audio which was painstakingly restored and digitized by a team out of UT Dallas.

Pat Ryan: Which we’ve heard about before around here.

Ben Feist: Yeah, yeah, so I’m sure in great detail. So their work was just phenomenal. And I managed to get my hands on a copy of this audio. And I was very disappointed to hear that it actually had many audio defects in it. And these defects were fine I think for the research that was being done using that audio. You can still tell what everybody was saying, everything’s intelligible. But in terms of playing it back for public consumption it suffered a little bit from having something called wow and flutter which is a technical term which means speed variations happening almost like the sound of an opera singer holding a note. With the vibrato going up and down at about that frequency was pervasive through all of the audio so the purpose of — go ahead.

Pat Ryan: Let me ask did you did you realize that it had that just from listening to it? Was your ear tuned well enough to tell that?

Ben Feist: Yes. I think anybody who listened to it would tell you there was something wrong. It sounded like everybody was worried as they were talking.

Pat Ryan: Like their voice wavering because they weren’t sure what they were going to ask.

Ben Feist: That’s right. Yeah, something like that. So after knowing about this audio that it existed since 2014 and finally getting my hands on it in late 2017, I was very disappointed and had to come up with a technical way to solve this problem. And my background is in software engineering. So I just approached it like a programming problem and sort of Googled my way through what’s out there that can solve these kinds of problems. And there isn’t a lot. And I began a journey of trying to figure out a way to technically solve it which I’m happy to tell you about if you’re interested.

Pat Ryan: Yes. And first before I get there what was it that made you aware that this stuff existed in the first place? I think you said in 2014 you knew about it, but how did that happen?

Ben Feist: Well, when I was doing the restoration work on Apollo 17 I had a deep down fear that there might be some other person out there doing the same thing. So I began writing a series of blog posts on a personal website that just told people that, hey, I’m doing this step by step, and then each step took several years. And I was contacted by the people — by Dr. Hansen and by Doug Oard, somebody who works in the University of Maryland, a professor there, who approached me basically saying, hey, how have you solved the time problem of when did these analog tapes — playing them back at the right speed when did things occur on these tapes. And they started an email thread with me way back in 2014.

Pat Ryan: Right.

Ben Feist: And they explained about this 30 track audio that they were attempting at that point. I don’t think they’d even started to digitize. And so as soon as I found out it existed I, of course, wanted a copy.

Pat Ryan: Okay. Then you were going to tell me about how you corrected or fixed if you will the wow and flutter that you were hearing starting with the Apollo 11 tapes.

Ben Feist: Yes, the Apollo 11 tapes were what this was all done on. Essentially each of the tapes is a 30 track tape. And track 1 of each of these tapes has a time code on it in a format called an IRIG. So an IRIG time code signal sounds like dial up modem sounds. It’s just sort of this audio buzzing noise that you can’t make heads or tails of.

Ben Feist: But I wanted to know what time things occurred, so I needed to figure out how to decode this IRIG time code in a digital format. So basically process that sound through a piece of software that I could write that would then tell me what time it was at every give point in the tape. So I wrote that software. The IRIG time — I always say ear-RIG because I only ever read it, but everybody else I’ve ever heard say it says I-RIG

Pat Ryan: IRIG, yeah.

Ben Feist: So I have to try to remember that. So I found the spec on what that time code consists of. And it’s actually quite a primitive signal that a Joe Blow like me could actually figure out and understand. It’s not a very complicated multiplex signal of any sort. It has very basic timing information in it. So I wrote a piece of software that did that. And it pulled that information out. And it told me that the tapes were being played at the wrong speed. They varied almost by 45 minutes over a 16 hour tape. And this is a natural problem to have when you’re dealing with analog equipment. Especially when there’s only one machine in the world that can play these tapes back how do you determine what speed it was supposed to be playing back at?

Pat Ryan: And you’re able to tell that there was a discrepancy because the IRIG time code wasn’t matching up with how long it took you to actually play the tape out?

Ben Feist: That’s correct. So because these tape recordings had been turned digital by digitizing them, the digital audio files definitely had a known length. And the time that was coming out was running off a very different speed than the actual digital files. And the real breakthrough was understanding that the signal itself of the IRIG time code contains a carrier wave. This carrier wave is a tone that’s supposed to always be playing at 1 kilohertz. And it’s a simple sine wave tone. And you could look at the flutter and wow in the tape to see that that waivered above and below 1 kilohertz very regularly, almost three times a second, was the flutter. And the wow was a very long time period shift in speed that I was just describing that made the time code be way off.

Pat Ryan: And we think that the cause of this is the mechanical playback when the tapes were digitized?

Ben Feist: Well, this is me sitting in my basement in Canada trying to imagine what could have caused this. I don’t know anything about tape machines or what it takes to make them work properly. But I was imagining some sort of fly wheel balance problem that could have been spinning and causing a wobble or a warble to be introduced. And perhaps older motors or parts of the machine that weren’t working the way they originally did that made it play back at a long period different rate.

Pat Ryan: And you were attempting software to compensate for whatever was causing this?

Ben Feist: Yeah, luckily I didn’t have to become a mechanical engineer to try to fix the machine. The digitization was already finished. So I had to make do with what was there. And this carrier wave became the key to the entire thing. What I could do was write software with another gentleman who I found who had written very similar software, and he lives in Europe. And he basically said if we can figure out each sample of this time code, if we figure out how far off that carrier is from one kilohertz, that we can create a fingerprint that is a corrective fingerprint for the speed variation, the flutter and the wow for this entire tape. So sample by sample you go through each. And for people who don’t know what a sample is, it’s essentially a digital frame of information that if you glue these together become sound. So each frame of information of the sounds we could check what the actual frequency was of the carrier and say that this sample needs to be sped up or slowed down by this amount —

Ben Feist: — and we did that processing each of the 11,000 hours of audio. So we —

Pat Ryan: In pieces that were how long?

Ben Feist: Sixteen hours in length. Each track of each tape is 16 hours in length.

Pat Ryan: And when you were examining them were you examining them at say one second’s worth or one half second’s worth or what in order to make that judgment?

Ben Feist: No, at 8,000 frames per second, at 8,000 samples per second we could look at that carrier and tell it to adjust.

Pat Ryan: And you were at each one of those 8,000 frames?

Ben Feist: That’s right. This is not something that can be done manually. You set your computer to work and you go have a coffee, and you stare impatiently and wait for the result. And then open up the result and have a look. And lo and behold the carrier wave was flat at 1 kilohertz. And if you did an analysis of the time code we reduced that variance to less than two seconds over 16 hours of speed variance.

Pat Ryan: Terrific. My goodness. And then when you played it back did it make a big difference in your ear to hear it?

Ben Feist: A huge difference. It essentially turned that in from something that sounded very far away and in the distance to something that sounds like it was played much more recently. Everybody’s tone of voice is their actual tone of voice because we know this is the exact speed that the tape was recorded at based on the very accurate time code that was being laid on track 1. So the important thing to think of here is that track 1 carrier is what gave us the fingerprint. But we could write the corrective resampling to every adjacent track on each 30 track. So even if an adjacent track was silent or had huge gaps of nobody is talking in it, even the part that was gap is re-speeded and corrected and has flutter removed from it.

Pat Ryan: So that the finished product, all 30 tracks, still have their integrity in terms of their time relationship to one another.

Ben Feist: That’s correct.

Pat Ryan: Wow, that’s neat. And for anybody who may have heard some of that in our earlier podcasts, we used that corrected version. That’s what you were hearing, and it really did sound they were people talking today.

Ben Feist: Yeah. And I think if the machine was new and it was 1970, say, and we were playing those tapes back that’s what the machine would have played back for us to digitize had digitization existed in 1970.

Pat Ryan: Right. Now, from the point of having done that and you’ve got this great sounding audio, how did you then get connected to the NASA work in restoring the 1969 era Mission Control Center here, the Apollo Mission Control Center?

Ben Feist: Well, that’s an entirely unrelated and crazy story —

Pat Ryan: Okay.

Ben Feist: — of myself getting a job at NASA. I now work at Johnson Space Center in Houston. And that is because of the work I did on Apollo 17, eventually slowly leading to me being given an opportunity there. So I’m very excited about that, and it’s something quite new. But Gerry Griffin who was one of the flight directors on Apollo 11, I got to know him, and he said that if you’re going to Johnson Space Center there’s somebody you should meet, and that somebody is Sandra Tetley. So I didn’t know who Sandra was or what she was working on and I met her. And I told her about this work that I was doing. And she, oh my goodness, can you please help us to make the MOCR restoration as historically accurate as we possibly can. And I said of course I would. That sounds like a dream.

Pat Ryan: And tell me about your role in that. What have you been doing?

Ben Feist: This is again related to the 30 track. I was part of the team that made the recent film called Apollo 11. And that film used this restored 30 track audio. A gentleman named Stephen Slater from the UK used this audio to add sound to the previously silent 16 millimeter footage that was shot in Mission Control. So we’d be able to figure out who somebody was and roughly when the silent footage was shot in Mission Control. And they can say, hey, wait a minute that’s the flight dynamics officer and it’s about seven hours after launch. And because I had corrected exactly the speed of each of the tapes and decoded the time code from the IRIG channel, it’s sort of a way finding capability to go to. Give me the flight dynamics channel at this time, and he painstakingly lip synched up the audio that was in that 30 track recording with the silent footage. And the moviegoers were basically going how come I’ve never seen any of this before? Well, it didn’t exist before this.

Pat Ryan: There was no before.

Ben Feist: That’s right. So when I told Sandra about that work on the 16 millimeter film that now had audio to it, and the fact that all the 16 millimeter footage from Apollo 11 had been rescanned for the film, and we were able to then scrub through the 16 mill film and determine what happened in the mission. What was on the desks, what was on the screens, what were people saying at every step of the mission to try to help make sure that MOCR was exactly being restored to what it looked like.

Pat Ryan: Now, you’ve posted that restored audio out in a public website, too, where anybody can see it without having to come to Houston.

Ben Feist: Yes, not quite yet. I’ve not quite finished this website. But it’s going to be launched in June. And it’s essentially the same thing that I did for Apollo 17, a real time recreation of the mission, but it’s the real time recreation of all of Apollo 11. And during the Apollo 11 anniversary the general public will be able to go this website, open it up and drop in on history and see what was going on in the mission right now. What photos were being taken by the crew, what stage of the mission are they in, are they walking on the surface or during a sleep period? It’s all going to be real time. And it’s essentially this direct way to experience the mission. And part of that this time, what Apollo 17 didn’t have, I have all the 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio now synchronized to exact mission time that you’ll be able to open up a panel and click on any position in Mission Control and hear what that person was both saying to the people in their support rooms and what were they listening to from other controllers to really unravel how did Mission Control operate during Apollo 11.

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I really hope you enjoyed both of these conversations about restoring the Apollo Mission Control Center. Very exciting stuff. And actually we’re about to open it up to the public here very soon later this month. You can check out our Apollo page. Houston We Have a Podcast has a page dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Apollo . This episode will be one of them. But we’ve also gone into depth especially with that talk with Ben Feist. We went into a deep couple of episodes called “ The Heroes Behind the Heroes ” of the actual process of recovering that audio. I hope you check those out on that Apollo page. Otherwise you can see what else is going on here at the Johnson Space Center at nasa.gov/johnson. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the Johnson Space Center. You can see some of the photos once they actually open the exhibit of the rollout of what you can actually check out here at the Johnson Space Center of the Apollo Mission Control Center. If you have any questions for us use the #askNASA on your favorite platform. Submit your ideas. Make sure to mention Houston We Have a Podcast. We might bring it right here on the show. So this podcast was recorded on April 3, 2019. Thanks to Norah Moran, Alex Perryman, Greg Wiseman and Pat Ryan. Thanks again to Mrs. Sandra Tetley, Dr. Adam Graves and Mr. Ben Feist for coming on the show. We’ll be back next week.

'Everything has changed since Apollo': Why landing on the moon is still incredibly difficult in 2024

More than 50 years after the Apollo era, major governments and well-funded private companies still struggle with lunar landing missions. Why is landing on the moon so hard in 2024?

The blue marble of Earth creeps over the lunar horizon during a solar eclipse. The moon's black shadow can be seen over Australia.

On Thursday (Feb. 22), a phone booth-sized spacecraft named Odysseus made history. Landing at the moon’s south pole at 6:23 p.m. ET, Odysseus — built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines — became the first U.S. lander to touch down on the moon in more than 50 years, and the first private lander to ever reach the lunar surface.

This success was a welcome break from a string of lunar failures, with five of the previous nine attempted moon landings ending poorly for various nations and private companies.

Weeks earlier, on Jan. 19, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM) spacecraft successfully completed the country's first moon landing — albeit ending up upside down on the lunar surface due to an engine malfunction during descent. The lopsided lander's solar cells faced the wrong direction and failed to power its instruments and communications, forcing engineers to shut it down in fear of battery discharge. (Engineers briefly restored power to the lander 10 days later, but  the impending lunar night shortened SLIM’s science observations to just a few hours before it went offline again.)

Just 10 days prior to SLIM's landing, a private U.S. moon lander named Peregrine encountered many anomalies after launch, including a propellant leak that prevented the spacecraft from landing on the moon. It was ultimately rerouted to crash into Earth's atmosphere . Other lunar landing attempts made by Japan and Russia in 2023 similarly ended in catastrophic crashes, this time on the moon itself.

Government-funded space agencies of only five countries have successfully touched down on the moon: the United States, the former Soviet Union, China , India and Japan. Just one private company (Intuitive Machines) has succeeded so far, and several high-profile missions have failed due to technical glitches that led to fatal judgments of speed, altitude and orientation — a stark reminder that even after half a century since the Apollo astronauts walked on the moon, our closest celestial neighbor remains a challenging and dangerous destination.

So, what gives? Has humanity gotten worse at lunar landings? Or are we simply grappling with a new era of technological advancements, just like the teams behind the Apollo missions did?

"We did not get 'dumber' since the Apollo landings," Csaba Palotai , a professor of physics and space sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, told Live Science. Technology is significantly better today; your cellphone has more computational power than computers had in the 1970s. "But since the '70s there have been no astronauts and pilots on the landers to correct what the computers can't or won't," Palotai added.

Acing the technology (again)

Make no mistake: Landing on the moon is hard, with or without human pilots.

A major hurdle is the moon's virtual lack of atmosphere. The lunar atmosphere is very thin and varies with time, preventing engineers from including parachutes to slow down spacecraft, Palotai said. Instead, missions use fuel-powered propulsion systems to descend onto the moon's surface, making it challenging to slow the spacecraft from a few kilometers per second to a perfect halt.

Yet this and other lunar exploration challenges are not new.

While the Apollo program was ultimately successful in landing humans on the moon, it was the culmination of a large program that failed many times on its way to success. Early attempts by the U.S. and the Soviet Union to fly a spacecraft to the moon were riddled with failures, including post-launch explosions, malfunctions with guidance systems, and fatal errors with solar panel deployment. Even the historic Apollo 11 mission, which landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, was worryingly low on fuel and faced multiple unexpected alarms just before landing on the moon.

"People tend to forget about those mission failures as being part of the learning process," said Jack Burns , director of the NASA-funded Network for Exploration and Space Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. This experiential learning perch is where moon missions, especially a growing number of privately funded ones, currently are. "It's still hard to land on the moon, but far from impossible," he said.

Burns and other experts agree that just about everything has changed since the Apollo program, including the now-antiquated technology that took humans to the moon and back in the '60s and '70s. Engineers with the Apollo program had built the first computers of their time, including sensors that have since been made more powerful in a fraction of their original sizes. Much of the software and architecture customized for the Apollo program is effectively useless for space missions today.

Moreover, "that whole generation is out of the industry at this point, and a lot of that knowledge has been lost," said John Thornton, CEO of Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, which built and operated Peregrine. "We are relearning how to do this, but we're also learning it with technology that is new and different."

Half a century after humans last walked on the moon, organizations smaller than NASA — powered by a new generation of engineers — have taken on the same challenge that only governments accomplished in the past. Palotai, Thornton and Burns view the recent moon mission failures as the natural progression of a new industry.

"Personally, I'm not worried," Burns said. "It's just part of the growing pains."

Paving the way for affordable moon missions

While technological issues influence the outcome of a mission, funding determines the extent of the software and hardware testing done in advance of launch to reduce risk.

"If we had a billion dollars to do this mission, our chances of success would go way up," Thornton said of the doomed Peregrine, whose mission failure investigation is expected to take a month or two. "But we're trying to do this at a much lower cost, which means you have to try many more times before you get to that breakthrough moment of, 'OK, now we know exactly how to do it at this price point. Let's keep doing it again and again.'"

Back in the '60s and '70s, in the heat of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the Apollo program was the crux of NASA's work, and the space agency had 10 times its current budget to do the same thing. Between 1960 and 1973, NASA spent $25.8 billion ($257 billion when adjusted for inflation ) on the Apollo program and was backed by nearly 5% of the total U.S. federal budget.

Comparatively, NASA now receives less than 0.5% of the nation's overall federal spending, and that budget also funds missions to destinations beyond the moon.

"That changes everything," Thornton said. Back then, NASA was fine with developing something that cost tens of billions of dollars. In comparison, today the industry is trying to build spacecraft for about $100 million, an affordable price that's key to routine flights. This problem is fundamentally different from those of the Apollo era. "It's going to take time to learn how to do it at that price point," Thornton said.

Lowering mission costs also increases the risk of failure, at least to start, Martin Barstow , a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., told Live Science. So "we shouldn't be too surprised if some of these things don't work," Barstow added.

The first commercial victory

The Odysseus spacecraft’s successful landing on Feb. 22 marked a welcome breakthrough for the commercial spaceflight industry.

— February's full 'Snow Moon' rises this weekend. Here's why it's one-of-a-kind.

— Intuitive Machines moon lander beams home stunning photos of Earth from space

— China eyes May 2024 launch for 1st-ever lunar sample-return mission to far side of the moon

The lander (nicknamed "Odie") delivered 12 payloads to the moon, including six NASA science instruments. For these, the space agency paid Intuitive Machines $118 million through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS), designed to award private companies contracts to send experiments to the moon rather than NASA doing it itself. (NASA moon missions can cost up to $1 billion each.)

As part of the same CLPS program, Astrobotic plans to launch its second robotic moon lander, Griffin, and a water-hunting rover this November.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

Sharmila Kuthunur

Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur

SLIM lives! Japan's moon lander revives after freezing lunar night, defying expectations

February's full 'Snow Moon' rises this weekend. Here's why it's one-of-a-kind.

Passing stars may have changed Earth's orbit and climate, study finds

Most Popular

By Sharmila Kuthunur February 28, 2024

By Richard Pallardy February 28, 2024

By Andrew Jones February 28, 2024

By Melissa Hobson February 28, 2024

By Jennifer Nalewicki February 27, 2024

By Keumars Afifi-Sabet February 27, 2024

By Harry Baker February 27, 2024

By Ben Turner February 27, 2024

By Emily Cooke February 27, 2024

  • 2 Why do cats have bald spots in front of their ears?
  • 3 Asics Gel-Kayano 30 review
  • 4 'It is not very wise to spend the night in Grindavík': Iceland volcano gears up for another eruption
  • 5 'Finally, we have the evidence': James Webb telescope spots neutron star hiding in wreckage of famous 1987 supernova
  • 2 New AI image generator is 8 times faster than OpenAI's best tool — and can run on cheap computers
  • 3 'Finally, we have the evidence': James Webb telescope spots neutron star hiding in wreckage of famous 1987 supernova
  • 4 'Quantum memory breakthrough' may lead to a quantum internet
  • 5 Ultrasonic earbuds with 'advanced noise-cancellation' could launch as soon as 2025

IMAGES

  1. Apollo Mission Control Tour September 2021

    apollo mission control tour nasa

  2. NASA Apollo Mission Control Room Turns 50

    apollo mission control tour nasa

  3. NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon

    apollo mission control tour nasa

  4. After 50 Years, NASA's Fully-Restored Apollo Mission Control Center is

    apollo mission control tour nasa

  5. MSL Curiosity Landing NASA Social

    apollo mission control tour nasa

  6. Apollo Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center: World’s

    apollo mission control tour nasa

COMMENTS

  1. Historic Mission Control Center

    This is the facility where NASA monitored nine Gemini and all Apollo lunar missions, including the historic Apollo 11 trip to the Moon and the final Apollo 17 trip to the same lunar body. It is located in Building 30 of NASA Johnson Space Center. In fact, from this room, the NASA team exercised full mission control of Apollo 11 from launch at ...

  2. Space Center Houston

    Be sure to hop on the tram tour too, which takes you around the real site of the Johnson Space Center, including the original Mission Control room and a behind-the-scenes look at the astronaut training facilities. You might want to join VIP tours by NASA experts to gain a deeper understanding and inside knowledge of the center. - Tripadvisor

  3. Video: Apollo Mission Control Center now touring

    After two years, we are ready to show off the newly restored Apollo Mission Control Center! Two years in the making, this monumental project has returned this national historic landmark to how it looked in 1969. This room has been restored to look as it originally did during the Apollo program. To support the restoration, the city of Webster ...

  4. NASA Space Center Houston: The Apollo Mission Control Center Tour

    Today we are hanging out at NASA to see the Apollo Mission Control Center and the Saturn V Rocket. We learned how the Space Center in Houston is working hard...

  5. Apollo Mission Control Reopens in All Its Historic Glory

    The Apollo Mission Control Center has been restored to appear as it did in that era just in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. "Apollo captured the world's attention and demonstrated the power of America's vision and technology, which has inspired generations of great achievements in space exploration, and scientific discovery," said Johnson's ...

  6. Guide to Visiting Space Center Houston, Texas

    The standard entry ticket with Mission control tour. This is the same as the standard entry ticket but it also includes the Mission control tram tour. This costs an extra $15 per ticket, so for adults it varies from $44.95 - $49.95. ... This tour visit the actual mission control where NASA co-ordinated all the Apollo missions. It also ...

  7. U.S. Moon Landing: How to Watch and What to Know

    Although it is a private mission, the main customer is NASA, which paid $118 million for the delivery of six instruments to the moon. NASA TV will stream coverage of the landing beginning at 4 p.m ...

  8. Apollo Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center

    Find out why Apollo Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center is one of TIME for Kids' coolest places in the world for 2019. ... Take a tour of the Apollo Mission Control Center ...

  9. How NASA Restored Mission Control for the 50th Anniversary of the Moon

    Visitors to Space Center Houston can see the restored Mission Control via the tram tour of NASA's campus, which will play a part in this weekend's festivities for the 50th anniversary of the ...

  10. Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained

    Since NASA and partners restored the famed Mission Control behind that mission earlier this year, we thought we'd resurface our guide to every console in the famed control center for anyone ...

  11. Apollo Mission Control Center Restoration

    The New York Times: NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon. CNN: See Apollo Mission Control restored to look like it's 1969. CBS: Inside NASA's restored Mission Control: Welcome to July 1969. ABC: Restored Mission Control comes alive 50 years after Apollo. Houston Chronicle: Step Back in Time: Apollo-era ...

  12. What To Know Before You Visit NASA's Houston Space Center

    Pictured: the Original Apollo Control Center (White Tram Tour) The Original Apollo Control Center should be everyone's number one top priority because it is the most popular tour. You are able to go to the ORIGINAL Apollo Mission Control Center where they monitored and communicated the first moon landing, Apollo 11, in 1969.

  13. Incredible Moon Video Maps Exact Apollo Landing Sites

    A new NASA video shows the sites of each of the manned Apollo moon landings on the surface of our moon. The video shows the phases of the moon flash by as time passes, with each of the landing ...

  14. NASA restores Apollo Mission Control Center

    NASA's Sandra Tetley took Newsy on a tour of the restored Apollo Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.Learn more about this s...

  15. NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon

    On Friday, Mr. Kranz and Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, cut a ribbon signifying the official reopening of the restored Apollo Mission Control Center. It was a three-year, $5 million ...

  16. The Marshall Star for February 28, 2024

    NASA Tech Contributes to Soft Moon Landing. For the first time in more than 50 years, new NASA science instruments and technology demonstrations are operating on the Moon following the first successful delivery of the agency's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative.Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander, called Odysseus, completed a seven-day journey to lunar orbit and executed ...

  17. Why a private mission to the moon is still a win for America

    The U.S. hasn't landed anything or anyone on the moon in this millennium (the last Apollo mission was in 1972). Ironically, neither has Russia; in 2023, Russia's first lunar spacecraft in nearly ...

  18. Building on a Mission: Houston's Mission Control Center

    The restored facility can be viewed by the public on tours from Space Center Houston. Left: In 2011, Christopher C. Kraft Jr. speaks at the ceremony naming Building 30 in his honor. Right: The unveiling of the sign bearing Kraft's name. Credits: NASA. Left: Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the restored Apollo Mission Control Center on June 28, 2019.

  19. Space Center

    Secondly, our guide was well informed on all things NASA, and gave us tons of info on the upcoming missions to Moon and planned missions to Mars. Thirdly, the Mission Control tour specifically takes you to the historic Mission control center that was in use when the moon landing occured, and it's been recreated in exceptional detail.

  20. Houston, we have a restoration! Apollo 11 Mission Control reopens

    Apollo 11 Mission Control reopens. June 28, 2019. — NASA's Mission Control is ready to land humans on the moon again, multiple times a day. The Apollo-era Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR, pronounced "moh-ker"), a National Historic Landmark since 1985, has been restored to appear as it did when astronauts first walked on the moon 50 ...

  21. Incredible Moon Video Maps Exact Apollo Landing Sites

    This NASA video shows everywhere that we landed on the Moon during the Apollo missions. Judge Who Oversaw Trump Fraud Case Sent Letter With White Powder Romney on voting for Trump over Biden ...

  22. Building on a Mission: The Houston Mission Control Center

    Johnson Space Center. Sep 29, 2021. NASA's Mission Control Center (MCC) in Houston has served as the nerve center for American human spaceflight since June 1965. Perhaps the most visible aspect of human spaceflight, the MCC is the familiar scene on television of flight controllers monitoring all aspects of a mission on their consoles, with ...

  23. U.S. returns to the moon as NASA's Odysseus successfully touches down

    The effort bore fruit: there are now 14 companies eligible to bid on missions for NASA and six companies with mission contracts for flights scheduled for 2023 and 2024. Each costs about six times ...

  24. Moon Landing Is First Since Apollo

    T he Odysseus lunar lander touched down on the moon's surface at around 6:25 p.m. EST Thursday, marking the first time a United States spacecraft has landed on the moon since NASA ended the Apollo ...

  25. How NASA Restored Its Historic Apollo Mission Control Center

    The goal was to finish the restoration by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing—nine months away in July 2019. The historic Apollo Mission Control Center actually consists of five ...

  26. Restoring the Apollo Mission Control Center

    Sandra Tetley and Adam Graves discuss the journey of restoring the historic Apollo Mission Control Center to look and feel exactly as it did in July 1969 during the moments before, during, and after the moon landing. Ben Feist then focuses on the cleanup of the audio tapes for the restoration project. HWHAP Episode 96.

  27. 'Everything has changed since Apollo': Why landing on the moon is still

    Comparatively, NASA now receives less than 0.5% of the nation's overall federal spending, and that budget also funds missions to destinations beyond the moon. "That changes everything," Thornton said.