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What’s Inside NASA’s Mission Control

ByMarco Hernandez, Malika Khurana and Katrina MillerPhotos by Cassandra Klos

Inside mission control, each desk, or console, is labeled with a neon blue sign and its officers handle a subsystem on the spacecraft carrying the Artemis II crew.

This station is the nucleus of the operation. It’s where the flight director makes real-time decisions for mission execution, and where troubleshooting occurs.

Flight directors relay instructions through the capsule communicator — often an astronaut — who talks directly with the crew onboard.

There’s one new desk that did not exist when the Apollo program ended in the 1970s: Science. Officers for Science collaborated with the astronauts during their moon flyby.

Three giant screens switch between flight data and different camera views on the spacecraft.

Across the top, a monitor ticks down the time to reach critical milestones: surpassing Apollo 13’s distance record, beginning the lunar flyby and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

On the walls, there are posters and badges from years and years of previous missions orchestrated in this room.

Between all the monitors, wires and keyboards are the normal trappings of a workplace: lunchboxes, water bottles, backpacks and smartphones.

Models and toys

1

Crochet toy.

2

A rotary dial phone toy.

3

A Snoopy astronaut from the Apollo era.

4

A model of the Orion capsule.

5

A model of the Space Launch System rocket.

A bouquet of roses

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A vase of roses brightens up the center of the room. Since the Challenger disaster in 1986, a couple in Houston has sent more than a hundred bouquets to mission control to commemorate NASA’s space launches and honor the lives of fallen astronauts.

Snacks

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8

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Mission control is in a new room, and looks a little different than in the Apollo era. Wood desks have replaced green metal mainframes, and the ashtrays and rotary phones are gone.

Then and now

The mission control in the Apollo era. Source: NASA.

Mission control for Artemis II.

But the bones of the operation have not changed, said Judd Frieling, one of the Artemis II flight directors, who spoke from mission control to reporters on Saturday. Every spacecraft needs similar systems — propulsion, navigation and the like — to succeed.

“We’re building upon the giants that started it back in the Apollo era,” Mr. Frieling said. “We continued our evolution during the space shuttle program, during the International Space Station program and now on to the Artemis program.”