Johnson Space Centre (or: Playing Hooky on LPSC)

As Pamela mentioned earlier, I get to spend today at the Johnson Space Centre Museum. It’s not as good as seeing the shuttle launch with Scott, but it’s a really close second – I’m sure not complaining. Talk about chances to geek out.

Pamela dropped me off here just before they opened at 10am. After paying exorbitant entrance fees ($18.95 for one adult just to get in the door), and having my backpack glanced through, I got into the building and promptly went and got in line for the first NASA tram tour of the day. I took some video (though I expect to extract the audio and dump the video except for some stills) and lots of pictures. I’ll upload things when I get back to the hotel later today.

Before boarding the tram, I was required to have my picture taken and then walk through a metal detector. That said and done, I got on board and waited. The staff had decided to let us board a little bit late because “it’s cold” and they wanted to make sure we could still move our fingers and toes. It’s about 40 degrees out. I was perfectly comfortable without a jacket, so clearly I haven’t lost all of my Canadian-ness.

The last group of people to bard the tram were three girls who are clearly students that, like me, are playing hooky from LPSC for the day. Sadly, it was not their LPSC tote bags that gave them away, but their name badges on LPSC lanyards.

Pulling out from the museum, the tram drove through JSC to Building 30N which houses historic mission control. We got to observe the original mission control room used for the Apollo missions but that was in fact in operation through 1996. It has been restored to the way it was during the 1969 Moon landing.

This is fascinating when you learn that the computers they used (2 mainframes) had a combined memory of 200KB. This was big stuff! And yet… as I listened to him talk about this, I could only think of the digital camera in my hand, which has a 1GB SD card. The video camera in my bag at my feet has a 40GB hard drive. My cell phone itself has 2187KB. Technology sure has made some impressive advances in the last 40-50 years.

I am pleased to note (especially to some of my elders, in the most respectful way of course) that unlike some of the younger guests, I was not confused by the dials built into the monitors. I can remember not only seeing but using rotary telephones.

During missions, MCC was essentially locked down. If you were working somewhere else in the building and for whatever reason needed something from someone working in MCC, they used vacuum tubes to send messages. Our guide called it the email of the 1960s. It could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 years for the recipient to get the message and (hopefully) respond. These are the same vacuum tubes now in use today (especially in the USA) by banks and pharmacies to allow drive-up service.

Check out this link for more in-depth information on MCC past and present. I’ll post photos I took later.

The last thing our guide showed us here was real-time positions of the space shuttle (which launched successfully this morning), the ISS and various other objects in space. This page lists several real-time satellite trackers.

From there, we went off to Building 9NE, the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility. From the observation catwalk we could see all the mock-ups that astronauts use to train. They have most of the components of the ISS there, and while for the most part they’re not connected they’re in a similar layout (they’re restricted by needing to be both on the ground and in the building).

There are mock-ups of the space shuttle, including two of the “nose” pieces – the crew compartments. They can be rotated 90 degrees and shaken for more realistic effects. There is also a training area for learning to use the robotic arms to move thing sin space. This is apparently more tricky than it sounds, because obviously here on Earth we cannot create a no-gravity zone, but the robotic arms and motors are not designed to work in our gravity. We’re told the equipment they move around for practice is much lighter than the real thing, and often on wheels or similar to allow it to slide along the ground.

All the mock-ups are exactly the same as their counterparts in space. This allows not only for astronauts to train (and train and train and train) with the same equipment, displays, etc as they will have in space, but it also means that engineers can make sure new pieces or upgrades, etc. will work.

We did not visit the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, where astronauts train in giant pools to simulate weightlessness.

The last stop on the tour was a warehouse built around one of the three remaining Saturn V rockets used to launch the Apollo missions. I got some good pictures of it, too, that I’ll post at the end of the day. In the meantime, check out these sites to learn how the Saturn V rockets worked – they explain it better than I ever could.

Now, I’m going to let the cafeteria gouge my wallet so that I can have lunch, and ten I’ll explore more of the museum. I’ll post more as I can.

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