Building 29 - Simulations (Houston, Texas)

USA / Texas / Nassau Bay / Houston, Texas
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During the Gemini/Apollo days this building housed the Flight Acceleration Facility, a centrifuge capable of producing up to 30G. This was replaced by a pool used to produce neutral buoyancy for training for spacewalks during the shuttle era. That pool was eventually made obsolete by the massive Sonny Carter Training Facility (which is off-site from Johnson Space Center).

The building has been gutted and the pool filled in and has been replaced with the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) Avionics Integration Laboratory; (CAIL) will be used to perform integrated avionics and flight software requirements verification.
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Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Exploration_Vehicle
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Coordinates:   29°33'24"N   95°5'5"W

Comments

  • the last time i was there they still had the pool. they were using it to rehabilitate astronauts after missions. they also had the AIM which stands for Advanced Integrated Matrix. it is basically a complex of modules that they could take to the moon and mars. all in different configurations. some two story some with growth chambers, some with living quarters. they planned (as of 2005) to fill in the pool and make a simulated mars/moon environment and were going to conduct experiments where they would seal the test chamber(the complex of modules) and have astronauts live in there for weeks at a time in order to test equipment. and it's building 29.
  • This is building 29 at the Johnson Space Center, home of the Weightless Environment Test Facility (WETF). Throughout the Space Shuttle era and early development of the International Space Station, it was the one neutral buoyancy test facility at JSC, used for EVA development testing and astronaut training. The WETF was just large enough to immerse a mockup of the Space Shuttle payload bay or a single module of the space station. The huge size of the International Space Station necessitated construction of a much larger underwater test facility, the Sonny Carter Test Facility at the north end of Space Center Blvd.
This article was last modified 10 years ago