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Me in a dark photo overlooking the center. No flash photos allowed so as not to disrupt everyone, and we were asked to be very quiet as well.

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This is "Historic Mission Control" where the Apollo and many other missions were controlled. This is no longer an active control area, and when retired they returned it to appearance from the Apollo era. All visitors can come here; only us few on the fancy tour got to visit the active control rooms.

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Rows of seats overlooking the historic mission control room. This is where everyone would sit waiting to see if we landed on the moon safely.

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A Saturn V model outside the historic mission control area. This is the rocket that launched people to the moon.

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Lunar lander model.

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Mission control building. The "historic" mission control is straight ahead, and the active centers are to the left.

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Even the excellent tour guide didn't know what this was, some sort of robotic person. This is in the lobby of our next stop, the vacuum chamber building.

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A device to aid in spacewalks, as shown in the photo above.

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Our tour guide showing the inside of the massive vacuum chamber. Vacuum chambers are used to test devices as to how they'll operate in the vacuum of space. The building has a few, but this is by far the largest.

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Standing in the doorway of the large chamber (the door is shown in the upper-right) looking across the building. This is another tour stop just for us. Across are two or three smaller chambers and a variety of other equipment. Like all the other "private" stops, this is a working lab.

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The floor is 65-feet in diameter. The ceiling is 90-feet high. And the door is 40-feet in diameter and weighs 40 tons. It is technically a "thermal/vacuum chamber." It was built in 1963 to test the Apollo Command and Service Module.

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Looking up from the bottom. We couldn't walk inside, but got pretty close.

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I'm not sure what this is, but it's in the middle of the floor of the chamber.

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Mitch at the chamber door. Did I mention this thing is big? Photo taken by the tour guide. I don't remember his name, but gave a great tour.

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A couple on the same tour in front of the chamber. I took this just because the photo of me taken by the tour guide didn't show the whole chamber.

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Some other offices in the same building.