Use these navigation links to move between the Year 2023 pages.  Specific pages can be accessed at the bottom of this page

January 2023 (Part 03)

A Weekend In Houston: Johnson Space Center

The next morning we headed to Johnson Space Center and Space Center Houston.  We had rented a convertible, so despite a cooler January day, we just had to take the top down.

We had expected to spend half a day there, but wound up spending almost the entire day, partially due to the wait to get on some of the tours.  All NASA work was originally done at Marshall Space Test Group in Maryland, with some work at Langley, VA, then at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but the effort eventually grew too large, and was eventually split with astronaut training and mission control moving to Houston.  The site was their second choice, after the Air Force's base at McDill in Tampa, but that was removed when the Air Force changed its plans to close the base.  It certainly helped that the Vice President (and head of the Space Council) was from Texas and would eventually lend his name to the center, as was the chair of the House Appropriations Committee and several other powerful Congressmen.

As the home of astronaut training, they built and used mock-ups of all manned space platforms, which now made up most of the exhibits.  Here is the inside of the Skylab model

Johnson has the 747 which was modified to carry the shuttle.  It is displayed outside, along with the Space Shuttle Independence, formerly known as Explorer, "a full-scale, high-fidelity replica of the Space Shuttle built by Guard-Lee and installed originally at Kennedy in 1993, and moved to Space Center Houston in 2012.  It was built using schematics, blueprints and archival documents provided by NASA using mostly simulated parts, although some parts, including the landing gear's Michelin tires, had been used in the Space Shuttle program.  The cool thing about this display is the ability for visitors to go inside both the 747 and the shuttle replica.  The displays in the 747 included discussions and highlights of how the plane was modified to carry the weight of a shuttle and a video showing how they used remote controlled model planes, built to scale, to determine the best angle to mount the shuttle to allow it to lift off without risking collisions with the large vertical tail.  The shuttle had two access points, allowing you to enter the crew cabin and cargo bay on a lower level and the command deck on an upper level.  The shuttle had a mock-up Hughes satellite in the bay along with a robotic arm (Canadarm or officially the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS)).  This was really cool.

Loved the tally marks on the side showing the number of times it had ferried each of the different shuttles, including 57 ferry flights and 5 free flights with Enterprise, 60 ferry flights with Columbia, 20 with Challenger, 38 with Discovery, 35 with Atlantis, 12 with Endeavor, and 2 ferry flights with Phantom Ray (a Boeing  stealth unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV)).

We managed to get on the blue NASA tram tour first, which took us first to the  Astronaut Training Facility, then to the George W.S. Abbey Rocket Park.  The former turned out to be the largest high-bay facility either of us have seen, and we've seen many.  The first, right side held a mock-up of the International Space Station (ISS), with each of the modules represented including US and Russian modules.  The allowed the astronauts to get familiar with all the systems during their training.  There was another version in a pool, without much of the electronics, which allowed them to get familiar with moving around in low gravity.

The facility also held a shuttle crew compartment and a SpaceX Dragon crew capsule. Steve had to take this picture of the KBR sign, as his company is the prime contractor for astronaut training.

Here is a full scale model of the Dynetics mock-up of it Autonomous Logistics Platform For All-Moon Cargo Access (ALPACA) landing module built as part of NASA's Artemis program to return to the moon.

Here is a version of the Orion crew capsule.

Finally, there were several robots including Valkyrie, NASA’s next generation of humanoid robot also known as R5, being built and tested to assist astronauts or perform tasks not safe for human astronauts.

The tram next stopped at the Rocket Park.  There were two rockets outside.  First was Little Joe, an early rocket for Apollo program testing.  Next was a Mercury-Redstone rocket, used for several sub-orbital test flights and the first two Mercury sub-orbital flights with Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.

There were also several large rocket engines.

Inside the building was one of the last Saturn rockets.  This is so immense it is hard to take in.

After lunch, we headed out on the red NASA tram tour headed to the Kraft Mission Control Center.  When we came back from the first tour, there were a couple dozen turtles along this drainage ditch.  Hoping to get a picture we were surprised to not see any, but caught this heron obviously fishing.

The Mission Control Center is kept and displayed as though it is still July 20, 1969 and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are aboard the Eagle preparing to land on the moon.  The screens showed the displays and the audio of the event.  This was pretty inspiring and humbling.