The room was cold and smelled of coffee and tobacco, according to Time.
In total, the room was used during all 14 Apollo missions, nine Gemini missions, and 21 space shuttle missions.
Anyone with access to the building could come and go as they pleased, the Times reported, but that meant people occasionally left behind garbage.
"This place was not representative of historic mission control," Kranz told the Times. "The configuration of the consoles in no way represented where we were and what we did."
"The priority at Johnson Space Center is the current missions, the future missions, not preserving the past," Harris added.
The nearby city of Webster, Texas, where many Apollo-era staff lived during the program's heyday, put $3.5 million toward the restoration.
Space Center Houston — the museum associated with Johnson Space Center — raised over $500,000 on Kickstarter, and the city of Webster matched $400,000 of that fundraised total.
The group even pulled ceiling tiles that matched the originals from a phone booth in the Johnson Space Center lobby, according to the Times.
"We got a lot of items back this way," Harris told Houstonia. "More than you would have expected."
Installing LED lights helped make the lighting more look like it did in 1969 while also protecting the room's contents from UV exposure.
The team sought out historically accurate trash cans, chairs, and other items by scavenging around the Johnson Space Center, bidding on eBay, and requesting donations.
One curator got a phone call from a person whose father had worked at the factory that made the original console buttons. They offered a bag full of them, Houstonia reported.
"It was great, because we really did need them," Harris said.
The consoles are littered with pens, pencils, maps, stopwatches, binders, glasses, cigar boxes, and Winston or Marlboro cigarettes.
When the restoration team couldn't find original items from the '60s, they recreated objects with the most historically accurate materials available.
"Due to the low light level of the room, many of the screens in the photos and films were overexposed when adjusted to capture the flight controllers," Paul Spana, the blog post's author, wrote.
The team wound up shipping the consoles to the Cosmophere space museum in Kansas, where experts restored and reanimated them.
"After 50 years, the flight controllers didn't recall a lot of the details about what was on the screens — they had been focused on getting the astronauts to the moon and back safely," Spana wrote. "Between their memory, books, photos, and the digitization of films that haven't been seen in a long time, the forgotten details began to fall in place."
Visitors can buy tickets on Space Center Houston's website.
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