Who else can astronauts call besides Houston?

[UncleBill]

@rbroome

I was going to mention Greenbelt. I toured parts of the facility during their open house last year and we were able to walk by several control centers for unmanned satellites. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine bulking up one or more of those to handle a manned mission. Of course the key is personnel. A bunch of techs used to checking telemetry every few hours would not be able to troubleshoot a manned mission in trouble-or just needing advice. So the experienced people from Houston would have to get there pretty quickly. Which may or may not be difficult.

They WERE bulked up, fully manned and operational, ready to take over ALMOST all functions (not de-orbit) from Houston in the blink of an eye, and actually did just that during shuttle missions more than once for short periods. Shuttle missions stopped, they cut back those functions and staff. NASA did not put their eggs all in one basket.