Tuesday, February 23, 2010

SCH JSC SVMF NBL MCC

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Death by acronyms!!

All guests of the recent Tweetup event were treated to a crash course in all the lovely abbreviations around Space City. SCH is "Space Center Houston," the public/tourist portion of JSC, or the working "Johnson Space Center."

On a well-timed and thorough VIT ("Very Important Twits") tour, we were taken in groups to the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF), the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), the Mission Control Centers (MCC) and the historic Missions Operations Control Room-2 (MOCR2).

Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory
AsCans in the pool!

I'd been to some of these locations before while on various trips to JSC for medical checkups or screenings, and multiple views of them exist in my general Pillownaut Picasa Galleries... but even after all those trips, I still saw some new things!

Configurations are always changing in the astronaut training facilities, different hardware is always being moved in and out of the giant pool and on this visit, there were actually some astronauts training in the water!, and of course different missions are always being "controlled" by the Shuttle and Space Station centers.

For all the newest photographs and all my wonderful new Twitter friends, check out my NASA Tweetup JSC album.

Mission Control Houston
Beautiful miss Ivy as our Apollo FD

For additional views, check out Eric Merrill's set of photos -- his quality camera has a more powerful flash, and many of his photos taken in darker settings are far superior to my snaps!

There was also a professional photographer darting around the crowd, and some of his captures are on NASA Johnson's Twitpic area.

Finally, the hosts of the event took a group photograph of all attendees, and we're waiting for that to be released. Can't wait to see how that turned out...(I'm assuming someone will raise an alert when it's online somewhere!)