Once you have completed your time at the space center, a coach will be ready to take you back to the Hyatt Regency Hotel at 12.30. You will be picked up outside the main entrance of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where a coach will take you directly to the NASA Space Center. Our delegates can choose from one of the following tours: Private Tram Tour PackageĮnjoy a private NASA Tram Tour where you will be able to go on-site at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) and get an up-close look at human space exploration.

Please stay tuned to find out if NASA does call, or even if they don't, on this blog and on my Twitter feed and my Qik channel.We are delighted to offer our delegates the opportunity to visit the Johnson Space Center on the 12 November 2023. So, NASA, next time there's an opening for a crew member, I think I'm ready. After a day at JSC, I walked away having been to several of the trainers used by real astronauts and even tried my hand, sort of, at a space station EVA experiment. It wasn't exactly photo-realistic, but it was certainly better than a video game, particularly because of the immersive nature of wearing a specialized helmet.Īnd that was more or less it. Astronauts can either step into a VR helmet and gloves in Houston, or run the software on their laptops in space and try out various maneuvers they will have to do on the outside of the ISS.Īnd so when I put on the helmet and gloves, I suddenly found myself in a very realistic representation of space, floating around outside the space station, wiggling my hands in front of me as Homan rotated me around the floating research institution. Daniel Terdiman/CNET Īdditionally, it is being built to support a pressurized module that can sustain a couple of astronauts for a day or two, all with the goal of being able to perform much more complex experiments than were possible during the Apollo moon missions.īut there are other kinds of training these astronauts have to do, and my last visit of the day was to the VR Trainer, a specialized room where folks like Dave Homan design virtual-reality systems that help crew members learn how to prepare for the extravehicular activity (EVA) they will take part in on the space station.Įssentially, that means learning how to handle themselves in open space, outside the ISS.Īmong the tools created here is a software program that can run on powerful machines at JSC or even on laptop computers on the space station. Inside the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility at Johnson Space Center, there is a full-scale replica of the robotic arm used to move cargo in and out of the shuttle's bay. The set of controls used to dock the Space Shuttle with the space station were real. I stood there, knowing that probably most Space Shuttle astronauts, and other luminaries, like Bill Clinton, had sat in the seats here. I can't really comment on the veracity of that, having never flown a Space Shuttle, but it was pretty cool being in this faux cockpit. 'They'll be strapped in and.get used to the way it is in the real vehicle.'

'We have to have it the way it is,' said Jerry Swain, the Fixed Space Simulator facility manager. There's also a fixed base simulator, which is aimed at giving the crew a taste of running the shuttle in zero-G conditions.įrom my perspective, because I got to go inside it, the best part was the cockpit simulator, a full replica of a real shuttle cockpit that is designed to present the astronauts with exactly what they will be dealing with at launch and while in space. While I was there, several crew members, including upcoming STS-125 shuttle mission commander Scott Altman-who did a lot of the stunt flying in Top Gun, I was told-were inside the Shuttle Motion Base Simulator, a mock-up of a shuttle cockpit that can be shaken or tilted to give the crew a little bit of experience of a launch. That means that specialists can be brought in via video link to any training, as necessary. One thing that's good about these facilities is that they can be fully integrated with training rooms and simulators at any NASA center-or even foreign partner center. In the building, there is also a series of training rooms where instructors take the future astronauts and lead them through what amounts to classroom work.Īmong the elements covered are communications, data processing, control aerodynamics-that is, rocket motors-and more. But right now, everywhere you look on its huge main floor, there are very visible reminders of where NASA is in its evolution.

As with much of JSC-and Kennedy Space Center, for that matter-this facility is finishing up its shuttle work before moving on to Constellation.

Nasa johnson space center jsc