Behind the Scenes Tour at NASA's Johnson Space Center Part 1: Mission Control

I was almost 7 years old when Neil Armstrong first step foot on the moon in July 1969. As a child, I followed the entire space program, cutting out newspaper and magazine articles and putting them in a scrapbook. I was a geeky kid interested in science and science fiction, so the space program was right up my alley.

When Neil Armstrong radioed, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." I was living in Eastern Ohio. I never imagined that I would one day live just a few miles from the Apollo Mission Control Center in the Johnson Space Center (JSC) or that two of my children would attend the elementary school that is just down the street from JSC.

Despite living so close JSC I never visited until this Friday--49 years after that first moonwalk. My son, Matija (@matijal) is visiting from Slovenia this summer and asked to see NASA. As fortune would have it, one of my neighbors works there and offered to take us on a behind the scenes tour. At least as behind the scenes as visitors can get. Many areas are, of course, accessible only to those who have a valid need to be in them.

Mission Control Center

Whenever I hear about Mission Control, I think of one control center, but there are actually several different mission control centers in the building. This makes sense since there can be many missions operating or training at one time. During our tour we saw three Mission Control Centers: the International Space Station, the original Apollo, and Orion (for the upcoming Mars missions).

Here's our neighbor Chad taking us into the main entrance to the Mission Control Center. From left to right are my daughters (Aryanna and Aaralyn), Chad, and my son, Matija:

This plaque from 1981 is inside the limited area:

International Space Station Mission Control Center

We first entered the observer seating area for the International Space Station Mission Control Center. This is an active control center, though we didn't see any interaction with the astronauts while we were there. If you look at the monitors in the upper left of the photo, Chad thought that the second from the left was a feed from the SpaceX mission control center.

Here you can see how the observation room is set up above Mission Control. All of the mission controls have these rooms. Groups of 80 or so tourists stream through them throughout the day. When we arrived, a group was just going out of this room as we were entering. If you think about it, the transparency here is really amazing.

Apollo Mission Control Center

The original Apollo Mission Control Center is undergoing renovation. The consoles at the front have been removed for restoration, leaving only those in the rear. If you watch old footage taken from this site, you will see that many of the staff and observers were smoking. You can still see evidence of this from smoke stains on the backs of chairs in the observer room. Each chair in the observer room has an ashtray attached to its back so that the person sitting behind it could smoke. Although NASA wants to keep the center as original as possible, because so many visitors come through the observation room, they replaced the ceiling tiles, which were stained yellow from cigarette smoke.

Some believe that the filming of some of the scenes for the Apollo 13 movie was done here, but because the cameras at the time were too big to fit in the aisle, the producers built an exact copy in a Hollywood studio and filmed the scenes there.

Orion Mission Control Center

Orion is the spacecraft under development by NASA to take astronauts to Mars. The White Flight Control Room was renovated for the Orion missions. Although the first crewed flight of Orion is not scheduled until 2021, on the day we were visiting, staff were conducting a training session in the room.

Space Shuttle Cockpits

On the first floor of Mission Control, visitors can see and touch the front and rear cockpit controls from the space shuttle. The controls are robust, physical toggles and buttons. Some of the more critical toggle switches must be pulled out before they can be flipped to ensure that they are not accidentally switched.

This is the front cockpit:

Here is Chad explaining that the rear cockpit was used to control the robotic arm. The operator could look out the two small windows as he or she controlled the arm.

Todd

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