I first visited NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in 1986 and sad to say it was a bit of a disappointment.

Shabby would be the best description. One of the giant Saturn V’s was sitting outside in the rain and wind, with birds nesting in some parts of it. The rest of the place hardly looked any better and it was hard to believe that this was five years into the Space Shuttle era, when money should have been around, if not as thick on the ground as during Apollo.

Admittedly I visited in the wake of the Challenger disaster, so things were very quiet and the Mission Control room tour was more like visiting a mausoleum: dark, empty of people, unused.

I also was not impressed by our tour guides response to questions about the disaster: “Look, we take risks and this time it did not come off“.

Since the Rogers Commission report on the disaster had already come out a few months earlier and I’d read it, that answer pissed me off big-time.  The report had pointed out that there was a hell of lot more involved than just the usual risks of spaceflight, including some very deep, structural problems with NASA.

I came away with the distinct impression that if these guys were symptomatic of the rest of the outfit then they probably hadn’t learned the real lessons

I’d say the Columbia disaster seventeen years later proved that point.

The Mission Control room that I saw was actually the original one used for the Apollo missions and although it had been re-purposed for the Shuttle era it didn’t actually look a hell of a lot different from the days of Apollo. It’s also surprisingly small, which is not what you expect from the movies, TV or still photos.

A full upgrade would not occur until the early 1990’s, at which point this room was dedicated for tourists. The photo below is from 2012.

So far, so sad.

Although my first visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida a few years later showed the only other remaining Saturn V also sitting outside, NASA did spend money in the early 90’s to create a huge new building to house it and include a superb series of other historic displays.

But from what I read and heard, Houston continued to lag, as that photo shows.

However, it appears that NASA has finally upped their game at JSC. It’s taken them several years and a few million bucks but to paraphrase Seinfeld – it’s real, and it’s spectacular.

Here’s the same view as the previous photo, but with the “new” look.

Everything has been re-created to make it look as if the team had all just vacated their seats, down to the ashtrays, mugs, thermoses, empty cigarette cartons, and soda cans. These photos were taken just before those red binders would be filled with replicas of the original paperwork.

Below is a close-up of the INCO (“Instrumentation and Communication”) console in the third row.

Although the large TV screen will play the Apollo 11 “first step”, the whole thing is set up for the Apollo 15 flight, since they had complete documentation of MC from that mission, with details down to panel configurations and button layouts.

Not absolutely perfect of course! As the article notes:

The presence of “payload” and “MPSR” buttons indicate that at least some of the labels on this PABX are from the shuttle era, not Apollo.

Meh! Autistic pricks these reviewers!

All the buttons are lit up by LED’s controlled from a central computer (probably an iPhone X 😎) – as are the console displays, which are LCD screens of course, but mounted in the original frames.

I was even more impressed with this as an example of being detail-oriented, with a screen showing the data from the PNGS and AGS computers on the Lunar Module.

The images have been carefully tweaked, blurred, and graded to look as close as possible to what controllers actually saw (they’re even using a correct-looking IBM System/360 typeface). Since the screens were created by compositing together several video signals, getting them appropriately blurry was very important for accuracy.

And the following:

[they asked, in an] email to former EECOM controller Sy Liebergot about the can of tobacco on the EECOM console and whether it belonged to him or his counterpart John Aaron, and we got a fast response: “The can of Mac Baren’s burley is pipe tobacco,” he replied. “So it was probably mine since John smoked cigarettes.”

About the only thing I regret in reading this is that, unlike the JSC in 1986 – and then it was only for a while apparently – I won’t be able to sit in the chairs and push the buttons, but then that’s a general problem I have with modern museums.

For example, in the Henry Crown Space Center in Chicago, is the original Command Module of Apollo 8. I’ve gazed at it many times, but while you can look through thick plastic to the interior, what I want to do is crawl inside the damned thing, sit in the seats, and so forth.

While I accept that we don’t want to wear out the original, in this day and age of Hollywood special effects I don’t see why a perfect replica cannot be created for the public: $20 for ten minutes? Same with the LM, of which they also have a copy: to stand there and experience a landing? $100 for ten minutes?

I’d pay with a smile.