Mission Control Room: Photograph taken during the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing, Multiple signatures, 1969

Rio de Janeiro is the first major world city to have something resembling NASA’s famous Mission Control Room. The NASA nerve center, based in Houston, is seen here in a 1969 photograph taken at the very moment Neil Armstrong first stepped on the Moon. In Rio’s control room, giant screens show realtime video from subway stations and major intersections; a glowing map depicts problems in traffic and power grids; and an advanced weather forecast system forecasts rainfall across Rio. Control rooms have become part of our imagination of how the world works in power plants, war command centers, financial centers and a myriad of other locations.