Tag Archives: Houston

Southern US--Spring 2014, United States

Houston Gallery

Gallery

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Here’s our selfie on the tram waiting for our tour.

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I thought it was fun that cows were grazing between the buildings.

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Each mission creates its own badge. They’re displayed in the command center, among other places, but here are the badges for all the missions that trained at this training facility.

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These are components for the International Space Station.  They’re big enough for a person to move through.

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I liked this guy. He looks like a toddler on his first snow day.

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This is the command center used from 1965 to the mid 90s. When it was decommissioned, it was restored back to its 1965 condition.  It’s an historic landmark now.

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More of the ISS modules.

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This round thing is one of the Soyuz modules that take three people at a time to the Space Station. You can see how big it is by comparing it to the table on the platform beside it, or even the stairs. It’s a tight squeeze.

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This is the proposed Mars capsule. It’s the size of a SUV on the inside. Just enough room for 4 astronauts to sit for the months-long journey to Mars. Obviously, that’s not going to work too well.

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Some of the small robots they’ve developed to do all kinds of tasks in space and on other worlds.

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Shower in space.

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It was April Fool’s Day, so the cafeteria at the museum served purple potatoes with pink gravy. It wasn’t great, but we were starving.

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The rocket engines are enormous.

Southern US--Spring 2014, United States

Houston, Texas

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April Fool’s Day!  1600 miles traveled so far.

We’re space and science nuts.  Ask Abby—I think we dragged her to a kids’ science museum in almost every major city we ever visited.  So we got really excited about visiting the Johnson Space Center and we weren’t disappointed.

We started with the tram tour; it was kind of like the backlot tour at Universal Studios.  Only this tour took us to the mission control room where the famous words “Houston, we have a problem” were heard.  We also stopped at the training facility.  There we saw life-sized replicas of all the modules currently in space. There’s even a full-sized replica of the International Space Station (ISS) which is the size of football field.  The training facility is where US astronauts, and others from around the world, train and practice on the equipment they’ll be dealing with in space.  Pictures of everything are here.

Some interesting facts:  The US has had an astronaut in space on the ISS continuously since 2001.  We often have three or more.  The ISS is home to six people at a time.  It’s manned by US astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, Japanese astronauts from JAXA, and various others, including Canadians and Europeans.

The Space Shuttles are no longer operational, so all the astronauts get to the ISS in Russian Soyuz space capsules.  They’re tiny and only fit three people — barely.  I have a picture of one in the photos.  The ISS orbits the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h. and sees a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes.  Astronauts stay on the ISS for six months at a time before they rotate home.  Several have been to the ISS four or more times.  They spend two hours exercising every day to keep their muscles from withering and their bones from decalcifying.  They spend 10 hours a day conducting science experiments.  Much of the science might be considered basic (like how a match burns) but in zero gravity, all the rules are changed and things happen differently.
In the next 2-3 years, NASA expects to contract with private space firms to deliver astronauts and supplies to the ISS, instead of relying completely on the Russians.  When an unmanned supply ship arrives (currently being launched by the Russians, the Japanese and one independent space operation so far) the astronauts unload it and then fill it back up with all their trash.  They undock it and let it drift away.  Eventually it burns up (along with all the trash) when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.  They expect the ISS to be operational until at least 2027.

If you want a good novel about NASA, espionage, murder and mayhem, read Dan Brown’s Deception Point. I thought a lot about that book while we toured the Johnson Space Center.

Tomorrow:  New Orleans!!