Space Flight Operations Facility
- Architect
- NASA
- Year
- 1964
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
The Space Flight Operations Facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is NASA's original mission control center for deep space exploration, dedicated on May 14, 1964. Before it existed, controllers ran missions from a makeshift room of desks and phones next to the orbit-calculating computers; NASA broke ground on a permanent facility in July 1961 and finished construction in October 1963. Every interplanetary and deep space mission NASA has flown has been monitored and controlled from this building, which also served as a backup communications facility for the Apollo program.
the building
The original control room. When it opened, the Space Flight Operations Facility held 31 consoles, more than 100 closed-circuit television cameras, and over 200 television displays — a purpose-built command center replacing the ad hoc desks-and-phones setup engineers had used through JPL's early years.
significance
Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the facility still operates as the nerve center of NASA's Deep Space Network. Public tours are available with advance planning.
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