NBL, Ellington Field, Mission Control, Astronauts, & Cake!

Well I haven't been blogging as frequently as I want to, but for good reason.  I have been incredibly busy!  Since I last wrote, I have been on a tour of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL), taken a few more training courses, took a tour of Ellington Field, sat in on my first on the job training in mission control, and attended the end-of-training cake cutting ceremony for the STS-133 space shuttle astronauts.

The tour of the NBL was incredible.  The NBL is a massive pool where the astronauts train for extra vehicular activity (floating around in their spacesuit).  The pool is 40 feet deep and roughly 200x100 foot in area.  The pool contains full size mock ups of the space shuttle cargo bay, flight payloads, and the International Space Station.  We were given an all access tour of the facility and we were walking around the edge of the pool during real mission simulations.  While we were there astronaut, Alvin Drew, Jr. was simulating a space walk for the upcoming shuttle flight in November.

The above picture is a view of the giant pool, while the picture below is astronaut, Alvin Drew, Jr. being removed from the water after a 4 hour simulation.

What's next?  Oh yes, more training courses.  The next two classes I took were on the Waste & Hygiene Compartment.  That's right, the space toilet.  The first class was about the plumbing and how it works, and the second class was about how to use it.  I'll spare you the details on that, but it is pretty easy to guess how it works.  Here's a picture of it.

Our group of people in charge of the maintenance and crew training for the toilet have a pretty cool patch.  Here it is.

This past week we went on another amazing tour.  Our second tour was of Ellington Field, where they house the T-38 Talons and Shuttle Training Aircraft.  The T-38s are used as jet trainers for NASA astronauts, chase planes, and enable the astronauts to travel between Johnson Space Center in Houton, TX and Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL very quickly.

We also saw the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) which is a training vehicle that duplicates the Space Shuttle's approach profile and handling qualities

Here's me sitting in the pilot seat!

Both of the tours were really incredible!

Another first for me occurred this past Friday.  I sat in on my first OJT in mission control during a functionality test of the Common Attach System which is basically a big claw on the truss of the space station that is used to latch onto external payloads and science experiments.  I was sitting in the "back" room for the Operations Support Officer during the test.  I got to use my headset for the first time and was able to plug into the live voice loops, including the space-to-ground loop that the astronauts talk on!  Someone secretly snapped a picture of me in the support room sporting my headset.

Last but not least, today I was able to attend the cake cutting ceremony celebrating the end of training for the STS-133 shuttle crew launching on November 1.

Here is a photo of the entire crew at the ceremony.

Oh, by the way, the cake was delicious!

After the ceremony the astronauts stuck around and I was lucky enough to chat with them for about 10 minutes.  They are all really kind and down-to-Earth people (pun intended).  I was even able to get a photo with the commander, Steve Lindsey.  This is going to be his 5th spaceflight.

I'll do a better job posting more often in the future so I can go into greater detail.  If you guys have any questions I'd love to answer them!  Just leave a comment!