Employees from the Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson are helping to recreate one of the biggest moments in our nations space history: the mission control room used during the first moon landing.
Specifically, the team at SpaceWorks, a division of the Cosmosphere, are updating the famous control room consoles piece by piece.
The SpaceWorks facility west of downtown Hutchinson includes a restoration warehouse and workshops for metal fabrication, machining, woodworking and paint.
For the most part, we try to be self-sustaining as possible, says Jack Graber, project manager and Cosmosphere vice president of exhibits and technology. I would say less than 10 percent of the parts are done outside of our shop.
SpaceWorks manager Dale Capps is smoothing the edges inside a small rectangular metal bracket in the metal fabrication workshop. The part, a faceplate, will hold a monitor in a console that was used during the historic Apollo space missions nearly 50 years ago.
A replacement is not available, so Capps used one of the originals to create a mold to manufacture brackets in-house.
Graber says finding original equipment is the hardest part of doing historically accurate restoration work.
The actual components that would have been around in the Apollo-era are obviously past their prime so weve had to replicate some things that we may not have anticipated just because they are not available anymore, he says.
Graber and his team are restoring and preserving nearly two dozen mission control consoles from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA flight controllers used these consoles during missions that put astronauts on the moon and space shuttles into orbit.
The consoles were retired and shut down after the Discovery space shuttle flight in 1992.
The tours would come into there and they would just see the consoles dead; just turned off. The room was very empty in a sense, Graber says.
The SpaceWorks team is working to bring the consoles back to life.
So they will not function or communicate with anything. They will just look like they would have in a snapshot in time with lights, data on the screens, information that way, Graber says.
Two rows of the green metal consoles are currently in the SpaceWorks restoration facility. The team works on one console at a time. They clean and fix the wiring, identify which parts can stay, and which parts need to be replaced or replicated. The cabinets will be restored to their Apollo-era appearance with working displays and backlit push-button panels.
We have a layout for each console, and we match that layout per console. Then we will research through pictures to try and match buttons as far as what was lit at a certain time, Graber says.
