Technology History | Mission Control, Building 30 — Restored to a Single Afternoon

The landing was run from a room on the third floor of Building 30, and that room is now a careful reproduction of itself.

On 20 July 1969 the flight control team in Mission Operations Control Room 2 talked Eagle down to the Sea of Tranquility from here, roughly a thousand miles from the pad the rocket had left four days earlier.

The room kept working through Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and the Space Shuttle, and was decommissioned in 1992.

It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1985, which sounds like protection and was not.

By then NASA had already refitted the room for Shuttle operations and stripped out much of what had been in it during Apollo, so the designation arrived after the thing it designated had been altered.

Then it sat. The National Park Service listed the facility as threatened in 2015, after years of tour groups walking through worn carpet and sagging seats.

What rescued it was a fiftieth anniversary and a fundraising campaign.

Space Center Houston raised about $1.5 million through Kickstarter and private donations, the nearby city of Webster contributed $3.5 million, and the work ran to roughly $5 million in total.

Sandra Tetley, the Johnson Space Center historic preservation officer, led it, with Gene Kranz lending the campaign his name.

The consoles went to the Cosmosphere in Kansas to be restored.

The team worked from archival photographs and film to put the room back as it looked on one particular afternoon, down to the brand of pen the controllers used and upholstery matched to the original chairs.

A period coffee pot was found new in its box on Etsy.

Work began in November 2018, the ribbon was cut on 28 June 2019, and the room opened to visitors on 1 July, weeks before the anniversary.

That is the honest description: not a preserved room but a reconstructed one, rebuilt from evidence after the original fittings had gone.

It is worth saying plainly, because the room is more interesting that way than as a relic that happened to survive.

Getting in means booking through Space Center Houston.

The tram tour views the floor through the glass of the visitors' gallery at the back, and the longer tour goes down onto the floor itself.

The building was renamed the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center in 2011, after the man who invented the job of flight director.

Photo: the projection screens carrying Apollo 11 descent trajectory plots, with the controllers' consoles in front of them. The consoles are empty and the clocks read zero, so this is the room set up rather than the room working.

Sources: NASA's Johnson Space Center history pages and its 2019 reopening release; Space Center Houston; the National Trust for Historic Preservation; collectSPACE.

Photo: NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.