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.

101'x202'x40?

[Hatta]

Sure it's not 101'x202'x40.4'?

Having visited it as well

[Anubis IV]

I have to add that it's simply awe-inspiringly large. It's so large that there are oftentimes multiple exercises and experiments taking place in different parts of the pool, simply because there's almost no danger of them interfering with one another.

Also, when I saw the astronauts suited up in the water and it was explained that in the case of an emergency it still takes several minutes to pull the astronaut out of the water, somehow it kinda hit me just how dangerous their space walks are. One of our family friends is an astronaut who has been up four times (and she's the reason we were getting a private tour of the NBL), yet despite seeing her launch and having her well-being on my mind when she's up there, somehow it never clicked until I saw just how immense that pool was. When I realized that all of that water would be trying to push its way into their suits in case of a breach and that the vastness of space is far, FAR greater than that comparatively minuscule pool, I felt like I finally understood.

As a fun side note, our family friend is rather short (she was once left suspended mid-cabin in the ISS as a practical joke by the others on the mission; she had to rely on the A/C to push her to the walls since she couldn't reach them on her own, which ended up taking 45 minutes, if I recall correctly), so she was actually working at the NBL quite a bit on testing designs for new spacesuits that could fit people of different sizes and shapes more easily. When you see the rig they use to lower and raise the astronauts, you get an idea of how serious it all is.

Re:Having visited it as well

[eric2hill]

I would have just taken my shoes off and thrown them in one direction.

Re:Having visited it as well

[hairyfish]

I have to add that it's simply awe-inspiringly large.

60mx30m isn't much bigger than an olympic sized pool, although it is 10 times deeper. But even then it's peanuts compared to this thing which is a 1000m in length and holds 10 times as much water

Re:Having visited it as well

[The Raven]

To be fair, they are orbiting. This means that someone just outside the space station is on a slightly different orbital track than the station. Typically this will result in 90 minute (about the length of one orbit) oscillations in position, meaning that from most locations around the ISS, you will cycle back into contact with the station about 90 minutes later unless you gave yourself a notable push away (and even notable pushes would often result in meeting the station again 45 or 90 minutes later).

Orbital dynamics: only the best non intuitive results for the past 60 years.

Metric

[Barryke]

Gallons and feet? How many bladders does that weigh?

NASA is metric.