AsCans and Tours!

Thursday, the 29th of April was a day packed full of tours of JSC and the NBL, where we got to see many things that the usual public does not get to see!

The day began with a tour of the facility where all the ISS mockups are stored. There were full scale models of each one, as well as a model of the Orion capsule. The Orion is currently has an unknown future, but the engineers are continuing to perfect the structure.

Here is an image of some of the modules:

In this building there were also about 2.5 full-scale shuttle mockups: two stand-alone noses with the personal cabins, one with the cockpit and the cargo bay, and one of just the cargo bay. The one with just the cargo bay also had a model of the robotic arm that takes every item out of the shuttle, so that they could practice the manuevers to get everything out.

This is the largest model, with the cockpit and cargo bay. The tail has been cut off and the wings removed, as they are not necessary and would not fit in the building:

Also, we got to sit in one of the crew member chairs: (the orange part is a parachute that is strapped to the crew member)

We were supposed to the training area for thermal tile repairs, which is basically a couple of tables and a projector that projected on to the side of the shuttle mock up, but there were astronauts in training, so we had to skip it and were not allowed to take pictures of them.

Then we got to see a Soyez shuttle close up, at least the crew parts of it, and it is really small!

Three people get to sit in those buckets for 2+ days, curled up in the fetal posistion, while the rocket catches up with the ISS. The shuttle carries up to 7 people, a bit more comfortably.... The capsule you see in the picture is actually one that went to space on Exploration 1. Very cool to see!

After finishing in the mock-up training facility, we were shuttled over to a conference room where we learned about the space suits. Did you know that they have about three different models to work with?

Here is an image of all the layers that go into a suit, the yellow one is a rubber bladder layer that allows the suit to be pressurized:

Suit testing occurs all the time, they even use some 'hollywood' suits that are not functional, but are used to test the suit-vehicle interfaces when designing the Lunar Electric Vehicle (which is being renamed since Obama says we are not going back to the moon...) Also, they even test new suit designs on the microgravity plane!

Next, Hannah and I traveled over to the NBL, where we had done our chamber training, to get a tour. We missed our tour last Friday because we needed to prep for the surprise ground test on Monday. Javier, one of the flight docs, gave us a great tour. We learned all about the history of the facility, were there are similar pools in the world and even got to see the Orien capsule that they were building for the pool.

The pool itself is 40ft deep, which is why it is so blue. It is extremely clean water because all 6.5 million gallons are filtered every 20 hours. For each astronaut in the pool there are at least 4 divers and one has a camera on the astronaut's face at all times. While we were there, there were two astronauts just getting out of the pool and since Javier knew them, he asked them to take a picture with us!

They are wearing basically their underwear, which is their main cooling system while in the space suit. The long underwear has rubber tubes woven through it and water runs through the tubes to cool them down. The one on the right in the picture is Steve Swanson, and he has been to space a few times. Here is his bio. The one on the left is a newly selected Astronaut Cannidate, or AsCan, and is just beginning his training.

After the NBL tour, we traveled back over to JSC proper and went to see Mission Control! We sat in the viewing area and learned about what each person does while watching them run a shuttle landing simulation.

Then we walked over to the Apollo Mission Control Center, where we got to go inside the room and actually sit at the consoles! It was very neat to touch and experiance a part of the history of the space program.

Here I am at a console:

And the room:

That room concluded our tours for the day, which was fine because I was exhausted, and we traveled back to the home we were staying at. Friday consisted of just giving a video presentation of our project, so I don't have much more to say about our experiance. But, you should check back soon for a video of our trip and project, as well as a link to a photo album of all our photos!