Apollo 11 Mission exhibit opens at Space Center Houston

October 14, 2017: Command Module Columbia is on display at the Apollo 11 Exhibit Opening at Space Center Houston in Houston, Texas. (Leslie Plaza Johnson/Freelance October 14, 2017: Command Module Columbia is on display at the Apollo 11 Exhibit Opening at Space Center Houston in Houston, Texas. (Leslie Plaza Johnson/Freelance Photo: Leslie Plaza Johnson, Freelancer Photo: Leslie Plaza Johnson, Freelancer Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close Apollo 11 Mission exhibit opens at Space Center Houston 1 / 17 Back to Gallery

In 1969, the space capsule Columbia made a nearly 500,000-mile round trip, carrying the first men to land on the moon.

Saturday, it served as a copper-colored backdrop for selfies at Space Center Houston.

"It's impressive," said Alana Oehler, 68, standing beside the golden-visor space helmet and silicone-tipped gloves of Buzz Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the lunar surface.

The traveling exhibit "Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission" made its debut in Houston this weekend, featuring more than 20 historic items from the first lunar landing, including the Omega watch of Michael Collins, who piloted the capsule, and the capsule's hatch door. The exhibit, which runs in Houston through March 18, will make stops in three other U.S. cities before residing permanently in a renovated section of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2021.

"This is a national treasure," said William Harris, president and CEO of the Space Center, pointing to the capsule.

Apollo 11 culminated the program launched by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to put a man on the moon within a decade as a way to catch and surpass the Soviet Union in the space race during the Cold War. More 400,000 NASA employees worked on 20 missions before Apollo 11 achieved that goal.

Five more successful lunar landings followed, the last in 1972 by Apollo 17. The astronauts of Apollo 13 never made it to the moon's surface after an explosion in the service module forced them to scrap the landing and led the pilot, John Swigert, to utter the famous phrase, "Houston, we've had a problem."

The exhibit marks the first time the Apollo 11 capsule, or command module, has been publicly displayed in Houston, even though the astronauts trained here and later received information and instruction from Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center. When the capsule toured the nation to celebrate the historic accomplishment, its Texas stop was Austin, not Houston.

"It's a homecoming," said Harris, noting the Apollo 11 exhibit coincides with Space Center Houston's 25th anniversary.

On Saturday, families lined up 30 minutes before the museum opened. Parents read display descriptions aloud to their children. Couples kept returning to gaze at the capsule in the center of the museum's grand hall, including Oehler and her husband, Charlie.

"I remember everyone dropped what they were doing when the moon landing came on TV," she said.

Other items on display included a star chart, a survival kit, complete with a machete, and an F-1 engine injector plate that regulated the flow of hot gases as the capsule re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. The plate was found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who in 2013, led an expedition to recover the first-stage engines from the Saturn V rocket that lifted Apollo 11 into space.

Bezos is also the founder and CEO of the commercial space company, Blue Origins, which has a test range in West Texas.

Visitors can also take a virtual tour of the spacecraft's interior by tapping on high resolution photographs taken by Smithsonian historians. On digital screens they can see unique details, including graffiti calendars, math calculations and reminder notes Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong scrawled on the walls of the capsule during their eight days in space.

As phone cameras snapped at the artifacts and families stopped to watch the historic video footage of the moon landing, a giant screen loomed behind them all. It displayed a projection of what many hope to be the next major space mission: traveling to Mars.