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Published: March 31st 2008
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Obfuscator writes: It seemed only appropriate that since we had spent so much time in Florida looking at NASA related things, and our friend J works for NASA, that we see what we could see in Houston. Sometimes you're reminded how lovely it is to have well connected friends. We got up in the morning, and headed in to the Johnson Space Center.
Mostly the Johnson Space Center is a lot of offices and labs and so forth, so we didn't take a grand tour or anything. At Kennedy you see all sorts of huge crawlers and rockets and such, because that's where they deal with all the big assembled pieces and shoot them into space. At Johnson they apparently test a lot of the components, but don't generally handle all the fully assembled gear. That's ok though, because J was able to take us to the coolest stuff there is there.
Our first stop was Mission Control. In the huge building that is Mission Control, there are actually quite a few control rooms. The first we went into is the restored Apollo Control Room. This room was used for Gemini, Apollo, later the shuttle, and then fell into
disuse when a new Shuttle control room was put together. Eventually someone had the bright idea of putting the Apollo era equipment back into it, rather than letting it moulder in storage. The room now looks as it did then, except with three bright new projectors showing photos and videos from the Apollo missions. J pointed out to us how much of the equipment and systems haven't changed as we walked around. It seems that mostly all the systems look alike, but are digital now instead of analog.
Our next stop was the International Space Station Control Room, which was the largest one in use that we saw. We came in at the floor level, and they were pretty busy in there, so we sort of tucked ourselves away in a corner and watched and had things explained to us for a while. While we were there, two of the astronauts aboard the ISS were broadcasting to Mission Control, and were doing all sorts of cool flips and zero-gravity stuff that you don't normally get to see. We didn't have the audio, but they looked like they were having a lot of fun. Later, we saw the Control Room
for the shuttle, one for Hubble, and J told us that there were several more semi-redundant ones that we probably wouldn't care to see.
That pretty much summed up Mission Control, and so we moved on to another large building, this one with huge doors. I don't know what the official name of the building is, but it houses a few neat things. As we walked in, the first thing we saw was a big robotics laboratory, in which a bunch of scienticians were busily working on all sorts of neat things. We didn't see any buzz-saw arms or rail guns, but we all know those things will be added in due time.
More interestingly, when we got into the huge bay to which the huge doors were attached, we found mock-ups of a huge amount of NASA equipment. Apparently this is where astronauts go to train, orient themselves, and experiment with the physical realities of the equipment. There's a full shuttle fuselage mock-up, and two shuttle cockpits. One of these cockpits can be tilted to almost any angle so that the astronauts can practice emergency escapes. There's also an early-model mock-up of the new Orion space capsule
that they'll be using when they retire the shuttle. There's mock-ups of pretty much every module of the ISS, and all of it is full size. There's also something they call the "Precision Air Bearing Floor" on which astronauts can work with tools in a simulated frictionless environment. On our way out of the bay, we passed what could be a mock-up of the future lunar rover, a huge vehicle with about 8 wheels.
We left NASA, and grabbed some Texas BBQ for lunch, before heading to Galveston and the beaches for the afternoon. It turned out to be overcast all afternoon, and sort of crummy, though it was still neat to see it. The water was mighty cold, but we saw a lot of HUGE jellyfish on the beach, which was sort of neat. Eventually we went back to Houston, and some of J's friends came over. We played Settlers and watched Snakes on a Plane, to wrap up a thoroughly satisfying day of exploration.
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