The space agency plans to build a deep space habitat for testing near the Moon, but that facility will certainly be much smaller than the space station. As it looks to expand human activity into deep space, NASA has indicated that it will end its participation in the space station program in 2024, or likely 2028 at the latest. NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) will host a Pre-Proposal Conference for the Neutral Buoyancy Lab Operations procurement on Wednesday, December 14, 2016. Otherwise, it's not clear what will happen to the NBL in a decade or so. And so on.įor this massive pool, the time to find new users is now. Movies are now made at NASA's rocket factory in Michoud, Louisiana. Private companies like SpaceX have taken over launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. Johnson Space Center isn't alone in this, of course. Every commercial dollar allows the space agency to offset the multimillion-dollar annual expense of the NBL. But there remains considerably more capacity for private activity, and NASA has asked Raytheon to do additional marketing to bring in more customers. Some have tested robotic equipment for subsea activities with offshore rigs, while others have trained rig employees in safe egress from helicopters transporting them to and from offshore locations.Īt present, NASA uses the facility for about three dive runs a week, and the pool’s commercial end is used about three days. Raytheon began offering commercial access to the pool in 2010, and has since worked with a number of oil and gas companies. John Grunsfeld, who visited Hubble three times, once told me that his body ached for days after a run in the NBL. Like the real thing, too, it offers astronauts a grueling, six-hour workout. Although astronauts feel the weight of their suits in the water and the water acts as a drag on motion, neutral buoyancy offers the best available analog to working in space. NASA conducted the first training exercise for the NBL on Januas astronauts prepared for the second mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. One question loomed foremost in our mind: Could the giant pool diversify enough to survive another 20 years? No weddings We came less than a month after the massive facility had celebrated its 20th anniversary. So even before the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, the space agency and the pool’s contractor, Raytheon, began experimenting with allowing private companies to use the pool.Īrs recently visited the pool in southeast Houston, not far from Johnson Space Center, to see how this particular public-private partnership was working out. NASA still needs the pool for these training runs, but it doesn’t need all of the massive pool, nor does it need it all of the time. Skybox-style control rooms overlook the pool to provide direct and indirect monitoring, communications, data connectivity, and control capabilities. Further Reading Inside the vault: A rare glimpse of NASA’s otherworldly treasures NBL Facilities NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) is home to a massive, 6.2 million-gallon training pool and related testing technologies, providing full oversight in a controlled, secure environment.
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