Gallery: NASA Mission Control Marks 50 Superb Years of Space Science

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    The Mission Control Center during NASA's Gemini-7 spaceflight, on December 7, 1965.
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    Ford Motor Company Archives
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    MIssion Control Center during the Gemini Program.
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    Mission Control during the early hours of the Gemini-Titan 4 spaceflight on June 3, 1965.
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    Astronaut Roger B. Chaffee at console in the Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas during the Gemini-Titan 3 flight.
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    NASA's Mission Control Center.
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    Mission Control Center's Master Digital Command System.
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    The exterior of the MCC in the 1960's.
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    NASA Medical Team at the Mission Control Center.
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    Three of the four Apollo 13 Flight Directors applaud the successful splashdown of the Command Module "Odyssey", on April 17, 1970).
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    Window looking into the Mission Control Room.
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    A group of key Skylab flight controllers and Johnson Space Center officials cluster around a flight console, on May 14, 1973.
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    The older Mission Control Center at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The new facility in Houston replaced this one, a massive technological leap.
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    Mission Operations Control Room in the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center during the Skylab 2 flight, on May 25, 1973.
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    Mission Operations Control Room, on 15 July 1975, on the first day of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docking mission in Earth orbit.
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    Lead STS-4 flight director Charles Lewis is congratulated by an unidentified flight controller in the Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center following the landing of the space shuttle Columbia at Edwards Air Force Base in California, on July 4, 1982.
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    Over the years, the MCC has been upgraded and improved with newer technologies, but many of the jobs remain the same.
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    The older MCC was known as the Mercury Control Center until 1963 because it was in charge of the various Mercury missions.
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    The Flight Director is the final authority in the Mission Control Center, and over the flight itself.
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    Mission Control in 2002.
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    Orion Mission Control Center.
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    Flight controllers watch the big screens from their consoles in this overall view of the space shuttle flight control room in Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center as Space Shuttle Atlantis, with the STS-122 crew onboard, lands at Kennedy Space Center, on February 20, 2008.
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    Orion Mission Control Center.
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    Flight Director Courtenay McMillan during grapple and unberthing of the Orbital Sciences/Cygnus cargo ship from the nadir port of the Harmony module on ISS, on October 22, 2013.
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    The viewing room, on September 18, 2013.
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    An overall view of the space station flight control room of the Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center, on July 16, 2013.
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    Expedition 43 flight control team with Flight Director Gary Horlacher during the release of SpaceX Dragon cargo vehicle, on May 21, 2015.
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