FIELD JOURNAL

NBL Simulations

The Sonny Carter Training facility's Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) is used for training astronauts, especially those performing EVAs, or extravehicular activities.

Each end of the NBL pool, or each test/simulation, has a TC room and a TD room, which are kind of like mission control rooms. TC stands for Test Conductor and TD stands for Test Director. People in the water have a radio receiver, allowing them to hear everything they need to for their particular test/simulation. In the TD there are 3 people - the ECS operator, the test director (controls/in charge of the test) and the camera controller (decides what goes out of the facility to the different receivers JSC, KSC, NASA TV, etc.). They are all monitoring different cameras. (See the picture at left.)

In the TC room - Hector is flying an astronaut around from inside this room. Hector is sitting at a station (see pic), controlling the SSRMS (taking commands from astronaut in the pool) in different directions. This station has three camera views; the piece above him is the communication controller and the laptop shows all the information about the arm itself -- what position each joint is in. The two hand-controllers Hector is using are flight-like. The box to the left is the camera controller allowing him to move cameras around to get a better view. This is a complex station operating three different systems all at one time, requiring a lot of concentration. The arm is driven with 3000 psi of hydraulics. (See picture at right.)

Low-grade mock-ups in the pool are made out of stainless steel and tideck (used as covering), as water won't eat up these materials. These are made as low-fidelity as possible to save money, but as hi-fidelity as needed for the astronauts to really get a feel for the real thing -- manipulate things, plug & unplug things, screw bolts, install little boxes, and run themselves down the handrail. After coming up, the divers must sit in the water, on the stairs, for 10 minutes observation time, and then are sent to the showers. The 10 minute observation time is used because most diving sicknesses -- the bends, oxygen toxicity, nitrogen narcosis, subcutaneous emphysema, etc. -- occur within the first 10 minutes after coming up out of the water. At the end of the day (when diving), we must stay for an hour, within five minutes of the decompression chamber located in this building, just to be safe. There is also a full medical staff onsite, with many coming from military backgrounds in the Army, Navy, and Air Force who have dealt with divers and diving in the past.

There are underwater cameras and communication so we divers can hear everything that's going on. We use hand signals to talk to each other and to talk to the astronauts working/training under the water. The divers are unable to talk directly to the astronauts, but people working in the Test Conductor and Test Director rooms can talk to them directly. Some of the things they might use hand signals for are to communicate stop; we can't hear you talk; we're out of gas; my ear feels funny. They do this with certain gestures, not hand signing the way hearing-impaired people talk, though there have been a few people who can hand sign. In the pool, there are two divers with cameras, which are called float cameras. These are used to feed video up to the control rooms. They also use still photo cameras.

The small yellow cranes hanging above the pool are jib cranes, and the white awning stand is where the astronauts are lifted in and out of the pool in their heavy EVA spacesuits. (pics) The big yellow cranes are D-mag cranes and are used to move the mock-ups around the pool and lift them in/out of the water. They carry the mock-ups through the big hi-bay doors and position them in the pool. For every astronaut that is training in the water, there are two safety divers, one utility diver and one camera diver -- four divers to every trainee/suit/astronaut in the water. This is to ensure that everything is done safely, and if there should be any problems, nothing is missed. The safety diver's job is to make sure if there are any problems -- loss of gas, pressure or communication -- with an astronaut's suit, that the astronaut is gotten out of the water safely. The utility diver keeps everything handy that the crew/astronauts need to train with, and if it isn't handy it's their job to get it. The camera diver's job is to film the astronaut during the entire dive. This provides video to look at later. The astronauts can be in the water for as long as six hours at a time. The divers stay in the water for two-hour shifts, and then switch out. Then if it's a six-hour training session, the first set of divers comes back in the pool. The astronauts in the EVA suits cannot come out of the suit for the entire session -- no lunch break and no bathroom breaks. So just like when they are in space doing EVAs, there is a diaper in the EVA suit, in case the astronaut needs to go to the bathroom. There is a little bag in the front of the suit, with an attached straw, which provides liquids for them to drink. The suit is pressurized to four pounds per square inch.