Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Steven Michael

Lee Hutchinson

HOUSTON—Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA's historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 ("MOCR 2") is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by Space Center Houston, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere's Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place. The room's lighting system was in the process of being worked on, and the room flickered several times between fully illuminated daytime lighting and dim twilight—providing an even more accurate glimpse of what it might have looked like during an actual mission.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

How we got to now

Do you want to know more? If you'd like to dig in deep on exactly how Mission Control worked during the Apollo era and learn a bit more about how the consoles worked, head on over to our If you'd like to dig in deep on exactly how Mission Control worked during the Apollo era and learn a bit more about how the consoles worked, head on over to our detailed 2012 write-up of the MOCR.

Today, the Mission Control Center in JSC's Building 30 (renamed a few years ago to the "Chris Kraft Mission Control Center" to honor Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. , the person most directly responsible for defining how NASA's Mission Control would come to function) includes multiple Flight Control Rooms, referred to in NASA shorthand as FCRs ("fickers"). But during the Apollo era, there were two control rooms in the building—Mission Operations Control Room 1, on the second floor, and Mission Operations Control Room 2, on the third floor (referred to as MOCR 1 and MOCR 2, it's pronounced "mo'-ker"). MOCR 1 was only used for a few flights prior to the shuttle era and was primarily used for simulations and as a backup. MOCR 2, on the other hand, was where controllers sat and ran every Apollo flight except for Apollo 7. "The Eagle has landed" and "Houston, we've had a problem" both happened in MOCR 2.

After Apollo, the room served as a shuttle FCR until 1992, when it was converted back to something resembling its early Apollo configuration and transformed into a tour stop. It was also used for other NASA events—personnel could book the room for meetings or show movies there. It was a frequent stop for VIP visitors and media who wanted to do something Apollo-related ( Ars included more than once !), and over the decades, the room slowly deteriorated. The carpet was stained and bare. The paint faded. And the consoles themselves, the objects of so much studious attention from generations of flight controllers, sat dark and silent. Random visitors could even run hands over the artifacts, casually pressing buttons and toggling switches that once perhaps were used for life-and-death purposes.

But with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing fast approaching in 2019, NASA finally had the ammunition it needed to push for the restoration—and now MOCR 2 shines like new.