After the visit to the mission control building, the group split into two groups. Our badges we were given were color coded. I was in the blue group, with the other group being the green group. This split was so we could tour more 'tight spaced' buildings without disturbing any of the work force. Mostly for the Vehicle Mockup Building, or Building 9, as the tour we got there involved walking on the floor where work and training take place. A tour no normal tourist would get.
Our group first headed to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or the NBL. (NASA, if you haven't noticed already, really loves to use acronyms). The name of the building is Sonny Carter Training Facility, named after astronaut Sonny Carter who died in a plane crash. This is that place you see in Armageddon and other movies with the big pool. It is the place where astronauts train for spacewalks that an upcoming mission requires. If someone has to go out and change a battery on the ISS, they they first spend many, many hours training in this huge pool on what they will do. The astronauts, in their suits, are perfectly balanced in the water, so they essentially are weightless. It is a process that pretty much all astronauts must go through before they can fly to space.
This pool is massive. It has the truss section of the ISS running the length of the pool, with room left over for a mockup of the shuttle bay. It is forty feet deep and holds 6 million gallons of water. Up to six astronauts can train at a time in the pool, with each astronaut having four divers along with them. Two to help move the air hoes and the astronaut (its difficult to move underwater.....), one helps the astronaut with picking stuff up or moving his arms into the correct position, while the fourth watches the astronauts face at all times in case of any emergency. We were lucky enough to be given our tour by the Operation Manager of the facility.
Our next stop, the second to last, was Building 9, as mentioned earlier. Inside this huge building are full scale mockups of space craft and stations that are commonly used in orbit. Such as a full scale replica of the ISS and all its modules. There is a full scale shuttle mockup as well as a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Two flight deck mockups of the shuttle also exists. One for liftoff and landing training, and one for orbit training. One of the coolest things that I got to see happened during our tour. The large doors on the far side of the building opened up, and inside came a vehicle of some kind. Turned out to be one of the new lunar rover prototypes coming in from testing! We soon were able to walk down there and see it up close. Very cool indeed! To bad these probably will never see real action.
The final stop was rocket park. After being to Huntsville and KSC, this wasn't much of a 'rocket park' as it consisted of three rockets, but hey, I've never seen one of them before, so it was worth it. Plus, the Saturn V there is probably the only 'real' one in existence. Real, as in it is made up of parts from the Saturn Vs intended for Apollo 19 and 20 that were cancelled. The other two rockets were Mercury Redstone rocket, and a Fat Albert I think it was called? Can't really remember the name, but is was indeed a short and fat rocket used out at White Sands, NM to test the escape systems on the Apollo capsule, which it did successfully.Well, that pretty much wraps up the trip. I know there are many, many small details I left out the might can been seen in my pictures. I do my best story telling in person instead of by typing or writing, so me telling you this all in person would give much more detail, as well as being much more efficient than my terrible writing. The best part to me personally happened after the event at the post-tweetup gathering, but that's a story for another time. Maybe around a year or so, it will be worth telling.
But on to new stuff now. I really enjoyed this trip, and can't thank NASA enough for this opportunity of a lifetime. I am extremely grateful, and hope to one day actually be working there!
