If ever there was an understatement this must be it.

200,000 miles from Earth an oxygen tank ruptured on board the spacecraft Apollo 13 and damaged the service module resulting in a loss of oxygen and electrical power. Commander James Lovell (played by Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13) reported the incident to the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston using just these words.

The story of the successful return to Earth of the three astronauts (Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were with Lovell) is  a credit to the engineering ingenuity of the astronauts and the ground team.

Anyway, its possible to visit the original Apollo Mission Control Center and see an Apollo era spacecraft (see above) if you take a trip the the Houston Space Center, which we did today.

The Space Center is the visitor section of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, named after the US President from Texas who started the legislation to build the center in 1958 whilst he was still a US Senator (it was named after him in 1973 when he died).

Houston was chosen as the site for the Mission Control Center because of its access to the sea, airports and its weather (allowing all year round working). Site construction started in 1962 and it opened a year later.

Here’s how it looked back in 1970 when Apollo 13 was in trouble:

Its just kept as a museum piece these days and looks just the same (except with fewer people):

In fact there were always two identical rooms and the one that you can see today was the one that was used to control the first manned moon landing (it has been converted into its Apollo-era format for viewing purposes).

The current Mission Control Center which is used to control missions for the International Space Station, the Hubble Telescope and Mars exploration was commissioned in 1998 and substantially remodelled in 2006 is close by but you can only see that from a TV screen in the old room.

All in all, the Houston Space Center is well worth a trip if you want to see were some amazing feats of human achievement were run from.