Space Center Houston: Mission Control, Moon Rocks, and the Shuttle

On September nineteenth, nineteen sixty-one, NASA Administrator James Webb announced that the new Manned Spacecraft Center would be built on flat prairie in southeastern Harris County, about twenty-five miles from downtown Houston, at the edge of a body of water called Clear Lake. The land was donated by Rice University from a parcel that Humble Oil had given the school. The location was not especially logical from an engineering standpoint, but Texas politicians, particularly Albert Thomas, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controlled NASA's budget, had made the case in Washington with considerable force.

Mission Control moved in and went to work. The Flight Control room that guided Gemini and Apollo missions, coordinated the first moon landing on July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, and managed every Space Shuttle flight through nineteen ninety-two, sits inside the Johnson Space Center campus. In twenty nineteen NASA restored the Apollo Mission Control room to its exact nineteen sixty-nine configuration, down to the ashtrays and the coffee cups, and opened it to the public.

The visitor center that makes all of this accessible, Space Center Houston, opened in nineteen ninety-two. It was designed with help from Walt Disney Imagineering, the firm that builds theme parks for the Disney company, and no NASA funds were used for its construction. It is owned by the nonprofit Manned Space Flight Education Foundation. More than four hundred space artifacts fill its halls, including the largest collection of moon rocks on public display anywhere in the world.

In twenty sixteen the center opened Independence Plaza: a genuine Boeing Seven Forty-Seven Shuttle Carrier Aircraft with a full-scale replica of the Space Shuttle Independence mounted on top. Visitors can walk through both.

This is the place where astronauts trained, where mission controllers talked them home, and where the evidence of what happened next is kept on public display. The moon rocks are real. The flight computers are real. The coffee cups in Mission Control were exactly where they were left.