Vacation, part 2 (Houston Space Center)

Space Center Houston is amazing! I highly recommend the Level 9 tour. It was a fairly light crowd during our visit yesterday, but plenty hot (mid-nineties from 10 am on) so to have been part of the larger tour groups on the open air shuttle would have taken away from our enjoyment of the day.


Since we were on the special, Level 9 tour, we bypassed the ticket lines, picked up our VIP badges and wandered around the main Space Center Houston building for an hour where we visited the Starship Gallery and the Astronaut Gallery and the full sized model of the space shuttle where you can peek into the shuttle cockpit.

The Level 9 tour includes a maximum of twelve people over the age of 14. We met our group in the Space Center Houston Building on the campus of the Johnson Space Center (which is actually quite large). Our tour included lunch so it wasn’t a surprise that the first stop on the tour was the cafeteria where everyone who works at the JSC eats. We were excited about this because of the possibility of meeting an astronaut but when we got there we felt just a bit awkward (remember that we still have big Level 9 VIP tour badges on at this point and it was easy to imagine that the ‘regulars’ were rolling their eyes at the silly tourists).

Things quickly improved from there however as we got to know some of our fellow tourists over lunch. There was a really nice couple from London and another from Spain along with a family from California and a mother and two daughters. The mother and one of the daughters were from the North East. The second daughter works as a flight surgeon (!!) at JSC. We really enjoyed talking to the couple from London who had come from an event in San Antonio at which they had met and had dinner with a number of NASA astronauts. There are a few photos (not Bill and Claire's necessarily) at http://www.collectspace.com/sightings/home.html. We had lots to talk about since all four of us are interested in the space shuttle and the whole space program. It also turned out that Bill works for Virgin Atlantic Airlines at Heathrow Airport and so, of course, we spent some time talking about the recently averted terrorist activity there.


After lunch, the next stop on the tour was the Neutral Bouyancy Lab at the Sonny Carter Training Facility. This is where the astronauts train for space walks on scale mock-ups of both the space shuttle and the International Space Station (which all the JSC people just call ‘Station’). Here is a model of what Station will look like when it is complete.


This training pool is roughly 100 feet wide by 200 feet long and 40 feet deep. On one side is the control room where they staff running the experiments and training communicate with the astronauts under the water (the windows under the flags). On the other side is the walkway for visitors where we were.

The practice space shuttle is at this end of the pool. See the open payload bay extending from the bottom of the picture (near the steps) to the top?

Along the walkway are video displays from the underwater cameras. This is Mission Specialist Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper who is a member of the STS-115 crew (the upcoming, August 27 shuttle mission) practicing for her space walk during our visit.

More soon!