The heat really cranked up as we entered Texas, never dropping below a daily high of 100° Fahrenheit (38° Celsius). Here my hybrid working vacation transitioned completely to pure work for a day. That’s where I needed to attend meetings at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston (map).
This happened to fall along our intended route although I had to adjust our schedule to make sure we drove through the area at the correct time. Originally I wanted to drive from Austin to Atlanta so I had to flip the entire trip to make it work.
We arrived in Houston after a long drive and stayed at a hotel just outside of the Johnson Space Center on the shores of Clear Lake. I would go to the JSC for the day and they’d do whatever they could find to keep them busy. So we had to go our separate ways for awhile while I took care of work.
It’s an interesting geography down there. JSC squeezes into the far southeastern edge of Houston at the tip of its own appendage. Clearly Houston went out of its way to annex this tendril and grab NASA into its orbit. It was not a part of Houston in 1961 when the U.S. Government selected the site. Lyndon B. Johnson was Vice President and head of the Space Council at the time so I’m not surprised it ended up in Texas. However JSC didn’t fall within the city limits until the 1970’s.
Serendipity
I attended a bunch of meetings at NASA and our group was heading out of the Mission Control Center. Of course we were all wearing suits even in the stifling Texas heat and looking all official. Meanwhile my family wasn’t going to sit in the hotel for an entire day. No, they decided to take one of the public tours of the NASA facility.
So a tram pulled up to Mission Control and a crowd of tourists got off. There was my family! Somehow our schedules crossed at the exact same place on a sprawling 1,600 acre campus. But at least I could prove to them that I was actually working!
Our NASA hosts provided a tour to the work group after the meetings ended for the day. However, my tour was probably a little better than what my family saw during their earlier jaunt. It was still a public tour, but with a much smaller group and we got to see some extra stuff.
Neutral Buoyancy Lab
For instance, the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory isn’t on the standard tour, and in fact it’s not even located on the main campus. No, the van took us a few miles away to get there (map).
The lab looks like a swimming pool and to an extent it is. However, it’s also something like forty feet deep with a complete mock-up of the International Space Station submerged within it. This lets astronauts practice in something approximating the zero gravity of space.
We were particularly lucky because someone was testing a spacesuit at the time. Open the photo above and zoom-in on the left monitor. This is the feed from an underwater camera focused on a live training exercise. It isn’t an astronaut but rather a member of the lab’s support crew. Just like astronauts, they have to be familiar with the equipment so they can create the best possible simulations. Sometimes they have to put on the suits to do that. Not so bad for a day at the office.
Space Vehicle Mockup Facility
Then we headed back to the main campus, to the astronaut training and space vehicle mockup facility. Here’s another way the VIP tour differed from the standard tour. See the blue balcony on the middle-left of this image, enclosed by plexiglass? That’s where the standard tour went through the building. By contrast, we were down on the showroom floor actually looking into the different capsules (or walking into them if they were big enough).
Rocket Park
The next place we visited was something that all tourists get to enjoy regardless of tour, the Rocket Park. Several vintage rockets stood outside and they were pretty amazing. However, the best rocket had its own dedicated building were it was laid horizontal so everyone could get close along its entire length. This was an entire Saturn V — and not just the final stage like we saw at Stennis a couple days earlier — but the whole gigantic thing from tip to tail. It put a whole new perspective on that tiny capsule sitting at the end of a massive controlled explosion. Those people had nerves of steel.
The only thing I missed was a meet-and-greet with one of the astronauts the previous evening. I simply couldn’t get there from the Mississippi Gulf Coast in time. Well, technically I could have woken the family up even earlier, driven all day, abandoned them at the hotel, and still made it. But that sounded pretty selfish.
Galveston Bay Brewing
My day at JSC left me feeling grateful for the people who make the entire NASA mission work. However I’ll conceded that I’m long past the point of ever becoming an astronaut. I’ll add it to my great big list of occupations probably beyond my reach, you know, things like Olympic athlete, paratrooper, bull rider, stuff like that. But I could still enjoy a beer, and that’s exactly what I did at nearby Galveston Bay Brewing.
Articles in the Southern Heat Series
See Also: The Complete Photo Album on Flickr
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