The Johnson Space Center is home to Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center (MCC-H), the NASA control center that coordinates and monitors all human spaceflight for the United States. MCC-H directed all Space Shuttle missions, and currently directs American activities aboard the International Space Station. The Apollo Mission Control Center, a National Historic Landmark, is in Building 30. From the moment a crewed spacecraft clears its launch tower until it lands back on Earth, it is in the hands of Mission Control. The MCC houses several Flight Control Rooms, from which flight controllers coordinate and monitor the spaceflights. The rooms have many computer resources to monitor, command, and communicate with spacecraft. When a mission is underway, the rooms are staffed around the clock, usually in three shifts.[cần dẫn nguồn]

JSC handles most of the planning and training of the US astronaut corps and houses training facilities such as the Sonny Carter Training Facility and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a critical component in training astronauts for spacewalks. The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory provides a controlled neutral buoyancy environment—a very large pool containing about 6.2 million US gallons (23,000 m3) of water where astronauts train to practice extra-vehicular activity tasks while simulating zero-g conditions.[28][29] The facility provides preflight training in becoming familiar with crew activities and with the dynamics of body motion under weightless conditions.[30]

Building 31-N houses the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, which stores, analyzes, and processes most of the samples returned from the Moon during the Apollo program.[cần dẫn nguồn]

The center is also responsible for direction of operations at White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, which served as a backup Space Shuttle landing site and would have been the coordinating facility for the Constellation program, which was planned to replace the Shuttle program after 2010, but was canceled in 2009.[cần dẫn nguồn]

The visitor center has been the adjacent Space Center Houston since 1994; JSC Building 2 previously housed the visitor center.[cần dẫn nguồn]

The Johnson Space Center Heliport (LID FAA: 72TX) is located on the campus.[31]