Our in-depth tour of NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory left us with waaaaay more photos than we could possibly use in the one feature. Rather than never letting them see the light of day, here are 46 pictures that we couldn’t quite fit into the piece but which were just too good not to share.
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Cassidy wiggles about in his EMU pants to ensure that they’re snugged correctly into place.
Lee Hutchinson
It takes some more assistance to shoehorn Cassidy into the upper half of his spacesuit.
Lee Hutchinson
Cassidy dons and connects his “Snoopy helmet,” a soft head covering designed to hold his communications gear in place.
Lee Hutchinson
Cassidy signals that the suit-up is going A-OK.
Lee Hutchinson
Cassidy dons the “low-fi” NBL helmet. Unlike the helmet on a flight-ready suit, this one lacks complex electronics or sun visors.
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Suit/Tool Engineer Bert Knight clips the tools Cassidy will need during today’s dive to his chest-mounted mini-workstation.
Lee Hutchinson
While Parmitano’s suit comm systems are checked out, his dive team—which includes safety diver Chris Peterman, foreground left—stands by in the pool.
Lee Hutchinson
Bert Knight checks the light levels on Cassidy’s helmet-mounted LED lamps.
Lee Hutchinson
Astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano (facing away, behind Cassidy) are slowly lowered into the pool by the jib crane operator.
Lee Hutchinson
Once underwater, the astronauts’ dive teams unhook them from their platforms and begin checking over their dive suits, adjusting the buoyancy and preparing to start the day’s training.
Lee Hutchinson
A small monitor next to the jib crane shows what’s happening underwater as Cassidy and Parmitano are lowered into the pool.
Lee Hutchinson
The lifeguard’s chair at the south end of the NBL seems a little incongruous, but safety diver Chris Peterman informed me that it is used when divers are swimming laps in the pool.
Looking across the NBL to the northeast. The test director and test coordinator control rooms are in the raised windowed area at right, overlooking the pool.
Lee Hutchinson
Looking down into the pool from TC-A, watching divers at work.
Standing with Chris Peterman at the east edge of the pool.
As we watched, the NBL crew was repositioning a module with the aid of one of the two large overhead cranes.
A diver verifies that the module is securely strapped into its cradle for repositioning.
Looking down at the HTV mock-up, positioned next to the JEM exposed facility mock-up.
Lee Hutchinson
Standing at the edge of the pool just off of the S1 truss, part of the immense Integrated Truss Structure, which forms the station’s “backbone.”
Lee Hutchinson
Looking down at the P4 and P5 truss mock-ups, with a mock-up of one of the Solar Alpha Rotary Joints (or SARJ) attached. Each SARJ is connected to a pair of solar arrays and allows the arrays to rotate and track the sun (or to orient the arrays so that aerodynamic drag is minimized at night).
Lee Hutchinson
This mural on the southern wall of TC-A depicts the NBL’s role in both space flight and the universal quest for knowledge. Below the mural are patches from some of the missions which trained in the NBL.
Bert Knight demonstrates the location of a spacesuit’s umbilical connections. The connections are on the suit’s DCM (display and control module) and are used while the suit is being donned and prepped for EVA.
Knight explains that on a dive suit, the electronic DCM module is replaced with a weighted blanking plate.
This tiny locking cam on one of the boots is used to make small adjustments to the length of a suit’s leg. Spacesuits are precisely customized for each astronaut, but they aren’t completely bespoke—it’s possible for astronauts to share gear if needed.
Detail view of a mini-workstation. This is affixed to an astronaut’s chest and holds all of the tools he or she needs during an EVA—or, here, during a dive.
Here, the same type of mini-workstation is bedecked with tools and ready to be used for the day’s dive. Front and center, clipped to the white retention ring, is the End Effector Tool, or “Grabber Daddy.” The Grabber Daddy is used to temporarily attach an astronaut to a structure, a method called “local tethering.” The Grabber Daddy lets the astronaut float freely; for an immobile connection that holds him fixed in position, the astronaut will employ the Body Restraint Tether, or BRT, which can be seen looping up from the right of the picture. The BRT’s jaws are clamped to the center of the mini-workstation.
Lee Hutchinson
In TC-A during Cassidy and Parmitano’s dive, watching the test coordinators run the mission.
Lee Hutchinson
While the test coordinators run the simulated “mission,” the test director and his team in the adjoining Test Director Control Room monitor the pool’s systems and the health of the facility.
Luca Parmitano grabs a bagel in the briefing room before the dive. The astronauts have a drinking water system in their suits, but no way to eat. Once you’re underwater, you’re there for six hours.
Lee Hutchinson
The south equipment bay walls are overflowing with mementos from grateful astronauts who trained in the NBL.
Some more mementos from the astronaut corps. Most of the items, like this T-shirt, were flown in space before being framed for display.
NASA – Dan Sedej
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