Convention in Houston: the Home of Space Exploration
You’ve heard the famous line: “Houston, we have a problem.” If you are a space buff, you know there’s a word or two missing from what Captain James Lovell actually uttered on April 14, 1970, when the lives of three astronauts were in danger because of an explosion that damaged the craft’s oxygen supply during the Apollo 13 space mission.
That mission represents a moment in which NASA turned what could have been a devastating failure into a spectacular rescue, and you have the opportunity to see where it happened.
Participants on the NASA tour in Houston will see Historic Mission Control, where NASA monitored nine Gemini and all Apollo lunar missions. From this room, the NASA team exercised full mission control of Apollo 11 from launch and liftoff at the Kennedy Space Center to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. You can feel the history in the room from the monitors to the rotary dial phones.
This stop at Historic Mission Control is part of an hours-long visit to Johnson Space Center that includes entering a replica of the Independence space shuttle mounted atop the original shuttle carrier aircraft, seeing the current mission control and strolling through the world’s best collection of spacesuits.