Wednesday 25-Oct-2023

Day 9: First day at the Space Center Houston! And I can even get there by foot! There is a nice path from the hotel to the center and only 900 meters away. So two days without Uber (yeah). The Space Center Houston is a science museum that serves as the official visitor center of NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. JSC is the home of mission control and astronaut training. In its early days, the center led the Gemini, Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, and Skylab projects. JSC was the home of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program from 1981 to 2011 and currently leads International Space Station operations and missions, development of the Orion spacecraft and NASA’s Gateway outpost program, as well as numerous other advanced human exploration projects. The center also plays an important role in NASA’s Commercial Crew program. The center has been in operation for more than 60 years is spread out over a very large campus and employs over 15,000 people (most of them contractors such as Boeing, and Lockheed Martin).

My VIP tour started at 9 AM and if you ever plan to visit Space Center Houston this is worthwhile to lock that in early. The tour takes over 3 hours and all takes place on JSC. We had a small van that took us through security into JSC and we first visited the building that holds the developers of suits and tools. We could even try on a real space suit glove! You can imagine the work that needs to go into the design and creation of a space suit so that an astronaut can perform an extravehicular activity (EVA), otherwise known as a spacewalk and still be able to use their hands and move their arms and legs.

After that, we went to the historic mission control room that was used during the early space missions (up to the last Apollo flight). They recreate the landing on the moon and the room is restored to the exact layout as it was in July 1969, including ashtrays full of cigarette buts 😊. They replay the last minutes of the landing and the panic that broke out when they had the errors 1201 and 1202 on approach to their planned landing site. This almost led them to abort the mission, until Houston figured out the landing computer’s memory was full and kept restarting. So as a result Niel Armstrong had to take manual control of the lunar module and put her down in the Sea of Tranquility. The kicker is that the astronauts went through many scenarios with heaps of error codes but never 1201 and 1202. Can you imagine 😊

The next stop was the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL). That reminds me, NASA (and I think scientist in general) are proud of their acronyms, for everything you can think of there are acronyms. But I am digressing, we are now in the SAIL, this is a full-size Shuttle with all its electronics, cabling, and control systems. The only thing that is not installed are the engines and fuel tanks. It is so 70’s technology and it even reminded me of my early days at Digital Equipment looking at some of the computers onboard. The astronauts used this facility to learn every detail of the Space Shuttle so that they could locate and fix any faults in the system.

Again great that NASA made this accessible to the public, they could have easily dismantled the whole thing after they shut down the Shuttle program and used the space for another purpose. Now we can enjoy this and be amazed that they managed to build and fly these incredible machines on 135 missions, mostly to build the ISS.

After this we went to the actual mission control room that monitors the ISS, everything in the ISS is managed from this room, they even have a schedule with 5-minute intervals for what the astronaut is doing on the space station! I would have loved to stay in that room for the rest of the day as they were preparing for an EVA.

Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub officially began their ISS spacewalk today around 2 PM when they opened the external hatch on the Poisk module.

Their expected seven-hour extravehicular activity (EVA) will include installing communications hardware, releasing a nanosatellite, and looking at a suspected leaky radiator on Russia’s new Nauka science module. That would have been really cool.

We got back to the visitor center around lunchtime and had a bit of a walk around, there are still a few things I want to do tomorrow so I left those for then. But there was the tour of the astronaut training facility at 3 o’clock that I could hop on. Again this takes you, this time in an open tram, onto the JSC complex to the building where there are all the mockups from the ISS modules and the newly developed Orion and Starlink capsules. Astronauts work here to learn every intrinsic detail about each module, how it works, read all the schematics, and how to fix it when things break. Again very impressive and good on NASA to make that accessible to the public.

As always here is a small collection of the many images I shot today.