From Mercury to Artemis: The evolution of mission control

Space missions can succeed or fail from the support they get from mission control. Here, we look at the changing shape of Nasa's most important room in space. Nasa's original mission control room was housed in Building 1385 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Designed to oversee America's single-man Project Mercury flights and early two-man Gemini missions in the early 1960s, Mercury Control Center became the template for every mission control since. Each console was responsible for a different spacecraft system, all decisions were overseen by a flight director sitting at the back, and all communication with the astronauts was through a capsule communicator (Capcom). The main screen featured a mechanical capsule, suspended on wires that mimicked the flight of the spacecraft. The circles on the screen represented the communications ground stations and ships dotted around the world. Chris Kraft developed the concept of mission control while working as a military aircraft test engineer. When he joined Nasa as one of its first employees in 1958, it had no rockets, spacecraft or astronauts. Ten years later, Kraft would oversee the first manned flight around the Moon. Much of this success was th

Mar 29, 2026 → Mar 31, 2026