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Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA's historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 ("MOCR 2") is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by Space Center Houston, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere's Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place. The room's lighting system was in the process of being worked on, and the room flickered several times between fully illuminated daytime lighting and dim twilight—providing an even more accurate glimpse of what it might have looked like during an actual mission.

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Gene Kranz may be the most famous flight director in NASA's history. He directed the actual landing portion of the first mission to put men on the moon, Apollo 11, and led Mission Control in saving the crew of Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the lunar surface.

Now Kranz, 85, has completed another undertaking: the reopening of Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The room where Kranz directed some of NASA's most historic missions, heralding U.S. exploration of space, was decommissioned in 1992. Since then, it had become a stop on guided tours of the space center, but fallen into disrepair. Kranz has led a $5 million dollar, multi-year effort to restore Mission Control in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20.

"I walked into that room last Monday for the first time when it was fully operational, and it was dynamite. I literally wept," Kranz said in an interview with NPR. "The emotional surge at that moment was incredible. I walked down on the floor, and when we did the ribbon cutting the last two days, believe it or not, I could hear the people talking in that room from 50 years ago. I could hear the controllers talking."

The room also brought back memories for Kranz of a shared sense of purpose.

"That group of people united in pursuit of a cause, and basically the result was greater than the sum of the parts. There was a chemistry that was formed," Kranz said.

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Buzz Aldrin and fellow Moonwalker Neil Armstrong chose to go to the Moon with an Apollo 1 patch. It was selected to honor the ultimate sacrifice of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who perished in a fire during the first test of the Apollo command and service module. The astronauts also chose to remember their fallen Soviet competitors and carried with them two Soviet medals, honoring cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who died in the Soyuz 1 spacecraft in 1967 and Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth, who was killed in an aircraft in 1968. Aldrin and Armstrong understood that even as Americans raced the Soviets to the Moon, success would be shared by all.

That’s why they also carried a small gold olive branch – a global symbol of peace – and a silicon disk about the size of a United States half dollar. Inscribed on this disk in microscopic text are messages from the president of the United States and leaders of other 73 nations solicited by Thomas Paine, then head of NASA. The messages, intended to be left on the Moon for posterity, are poignant, proud and congratulatory. Some speak of their own national heritage, others salute the courage of the three humans who strapped themselves into a rocket and catapulted into the unknown. From Afghanistan to Zambia, the messages have one common theme: peace. Neil Armstrong’s favorites

According to his biographer, James Hansen, Neil Armstrong identified three favorite messages. The president of Costa Rica hoped the Moon landing would produce “new benefits for improving the well-being of the human race.” The king of the Belgians remained “deeply conscious of our responsibility with respect to the tasks which may be open to us in the universe, but also to those which remain to be fulfilled on this Earth, so to bring more justice and more happiness to mankind.” Finally, the president of the Ivory Coast asked that the first human messengers to the Moon “turn towards our planet Earth and cry out how insignificant the problems which torture men are, when viewed from up there.”

I personally find the message of the president of Mexico rather prescient as he noted “in 1492, the discovery of the American Continent transformed geography and the course of human events. Today, conquest of ultraterrestrial space – with its attendant unknowns – recreates our perspectives and enhances our paradigms.” He went on to remind that human migration to space carries with it “a new far reaching responsibility.”