Swimming With Spacemen In NASA's Giant NBL Pool

willith writes "I spent two days at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, watching astronauts dive and getting a thorough tour of the facility. The largest indoor pool in the world contains 6.2M gallons of water and is filled with life-size replicas of International Space Station modules (though at 202'x101' and 40' deep, it isn't nearly enough to hold the entire station). Every spacewalk requires a huge amount of rehearsal, and that rehearsal is done right here in this pool. I talk at length with divers, astronauts, test coordinators, and test directors about how the facility works and what it takes to train folks to work in spacesuits. I also get to talk about the NBL's commercial future, and what's next for the big pool. Plus, lots and lots of pictures!"

Comments

Export Controlled Tools

[stoolpigeon]

Thinking about these:
"As for the rest of the astronauts' tools, we were restricted from taking photographs of some because they are export-controlled technology—close-up details of some of the specialized tooling can't be shown to non-US citizens."

On the International Space Station made me chuckle. Government is always there to provide my kind of humor.