NASA Marks Johnson Space Center’s 65th anniversary

On Nov. 2, 2026, NASA released a retrospective commemorating 65 years at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency’s human spaceflight center of excellence.

The retrospective opens with President John F. Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, speech before a joint session of Congress, in which he set the goal of landing an astronaut on the Moon and bringing them home safely before the decade ran out. After studying sites across the country, NASA chose a location near Houston and announced the Manned Spacecraft Center on Sept. 19, 1961. The center opened its doors on Nov. 1, 1961, at the Clear Lake property, with staff working out of 13 leased buildings in southeastern Houston while permanent construction proceeded.

Planning took six months, and building the first structures required 18 months. The earliest personnel relocated to the Clear Lake campus in late 1963. The nine-story Project Management Building went up between Dec. 5, 1962, and March 15, 1964, and was first called Building 2; director Robert Gilruth occupied a top-floor office there starting March 5, 1964. A building-number swap on June 30, 1974, exchanged it with the Public Affairs Building, which had originally been Building 1.

The facility received its current name in 1973, becoming the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a tribute to President Johnson’s backing of the space effort.

Work on the flight control center inside Building 30 started in June 1963 and finished in November 1964. A real-time computer went in during April 1964, and the first occupants arrived two months after that. The structure held two mission operations control rooms dedicated to Gemini and Apollo flights and simulations. By January 1965, controllers there were tracking the uncrewed Gemini 2 and crewed Gemini 3 missions in flight following mode.

Houston assumed full command of Gemini IV in June 1965 and has directed every NASA crewed spaceflight mission from that point forward.

In the mid-1970s, the control center upgraded its computer systems to prepare for the space shuttle era. On April 4, 2011, Building 30 was renamed for Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the engineer whose operational concepts still guide human spaceflight control. The facility now provides round-the-clock support to the International Space Station and to Artemis missions that will return humans to the Moon.

Building 5, known as the Mission Simulation and Training Facility, was finished in April 1965 and started supporting flights with Gemini IV the following June. Its original equipment included simulators for Gemini vehicle flights and a Gemini translation and docking mechanism, and simulators for the Apollo command module and lunar module reached Johnson in December 1965. Crews used the Water Immersion Facility for extravehicular activity training from 1967 through 1978, and in the early 1970s Building 5 held full-size Skylab component trainers that all nine Skylab astronauts practiced on. A late-1970s modernization for the shuttle program added simulators with fixed bases and motion bases to the building.

A 1991 expansion added the Space Station Training Facility to Building 5, which now trains International Space Station crews and also houses Orion and Starliner simulators. Neutral buoyancy training for spacewalks started with the Gemini XII mission in 1966 and moved through the Water Immersion Facility, installed in 1967, the Weightless Environment Training Facility, which began operations in 1980, and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, located in the Sonny Carter Training Center, which started up in 1997. The Weightless Environment Training Facility was constructed to fit the space shuttle’s larger payload bay, and astronauts used it for almost all shuttle extravehicular activity training through 1997. The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory now offers training for shuttle and space station crews, spacesuit testing, and lunar surface operations support.

Building 9 was built from December 1965 to March 1967 and initially contained the Technical Services Facility. In April 1969, workers turned part of it into a simulated lunar landscape featuring a Lunar Module mockup that Apollo 11 astronauts used. A September 1974 addition became the Mockup and Integration Laboratory, built for the space shuttle program; every one of the 135 shuttle missions relied on these mockups for training. A northwest extension completed between 1986 and 1988 received mockups representing Space Station Freedom and subsequently the International Space Station, and the building then acquired the name Space Vehicle Mockup Facility.

The Space Vehicle Mockup Facility today holds Orion spacecraft mockups for training, commercial crew vehicle mockups, and a gravity offload system called ARGOS. Separately, Building 37 housed the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, built to guard against back contamination by potential lunar microorganisms. Construction started in August 1966, and the first staff arrived in June 1967. Crews from Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 14 spent three-week postflight quarantines in the facility, while scientists analyzed lunar samples brought back by every Apollo mission.

After the Apollo program ended, the Life Sciences division and its laboratories used Building 37 until moving out in 2017. After the building was torn down, a Lunar Receiving Park was dedicated on the site in 2026, commemorating the laboratory’s legacy. Meanwhile, Johnson Space Center now functions as the agency’s human spaceflight center of excellence, home to the U.S. astronaut corps and the flight control center. Houston runs the Low Earth Orbit Program, which oversees International Space Station operations and commercial partnerships and destinations in low Earth orbit.

For missions traveling farther than low Earth orbit, Johnson hosts the lunar base program and the Orion crew vehicle program.

Two Johnson-based offices, the Human Health and Performance Directorate and the Human Research Program, work to protect crew health and performance as missions extend farther from Earth. NASA announced in October 2026 that Anil Menon and Josha Kutryk, astronauts for NASA and the Canadian Space Agency respectively, trained at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory ahead of an extravehicular activity to mount roll-out solar arrays on the station’s port-side truss, a job that NASA mission managers approved. NASA has set up a 378-day simulated Mars mission for four volunteers at a Johnson facility, with their exit planned for Oct. 31, 2026, to study operational and human factors that matter for long-duration missions far from Earth.