DETAILED SPACE SHUTTLE COCKPIT PHOTOS MOVIE

Unlike the Saturn displays at MSFC and KSC, the JSC Saturn V is the only one made up entirely of flight-ready stages. Suck it, other centers!īut then you get over to Rocket Park and see the Saturn V, and that kinda makes everything okay. The MSFC and KSC Saturns each have at least one test stage. I understand the whole 'get kids into science' aspect of it and I think that's great, but Space Center Houston is just mortifyingly bad compared to the visitors' centers at KSC and MSFC.īut then you get over to Rocket Park and see the Saturn V, and that kinda makes everything okay. But THEN, you get to see the capsules and moon rocks and the Skylab mockup.

DETAILED SPACE SHUTTLE COCKPIT PHOTOS MOVIE

The real space stuff is back in the artifacts room, and to get to that you have to first navigate under the giant kid habitrail & through the colorful kid plastic science exhibits, then sit through a short space movie in a hidden theater. Space Center Houston is amazing if you have kids, since it's basically a kids' space museum with giant ball pits, but it's pretty embarrassing to bring grown-up visitors. atop a specially modified 747 on its way to its final resting place at the Smithsonian Institution.

Here (again from an Orbiter in the OPF) is a picture of those tanks I took in the Lower Equipment Bay.Click to expand.Yeah, that's the unfortunately-named 'Space Center Houston' visitor's center, not JSC itself. Earlier today, the space shuttle Discovery made a low-altitude pass over Washington D.C. The beer-keg-like cylinders in the drawing would seem to be the supply and waste water tanks, which were indeed located in that area.

The 'lower deck' shown in the illustration was commonly referred to as the 'Lower Equipment Bay' or the 'ECLSS 1 bay', and was quite cramped. Mission Specialist Naoko Yamazaki is in one of the access holes. You can see in this picture from the STS-131 mission that there is no open gridwork in the area called out in the illustration. The picture shows it between the flight deck (upper compartment) and mid-deck (lower compartment) but there was no grid there, just two rectangular access holes. 'Aluminum plate' and 'open grid panel' appear to refer to structural elements, although 'open grid panel' is an error. You can virtually tour the cockpit, mid-deck, underbelly, and toilet via the detailed interactive images, zooming and panning to get a close-up view of the controls, as well as read overlays that. Here is a picture I took of equipment in one of the avionics bays in an Orbiter when it was in the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF). The 'instrumentation rack' in your drawing appears to refer to the Development Flight Instrumentation Unit, a rack of instrumentation flown only during the early 'developmental' flights of the first Orbiter, Columbia. This is what the post-failure voice was pulled off of in the Challenger accident. They originally had a pair of Ops Recorders as part of the telemetry system, that could record downlinked telemetry, including voice. (There were also three unpressurized aft avionics bays in the Orbiter aft fuselage the equipment in them was cooled by coldplates served by the Freon cooling loops.) 1 Answer Sorted by: 8 The Orbiters did not have a Cockpit Voice Recorder. The equipment in them was cooled by either forced-air cooling or by coldplates serviced by the Orbiter's water cooling loops. There were three of them in the Orbiter's crew compartment as shown in this drawing from the SCOM. Īn 'avionics bay' is a volume filled with computers and other 'black boxes'. This is probably the original that has been copied over the years, from the 1982 Shuttle News Reference. Tl dr that picture is very poorly labeled and contains at least two errors.

Detailed space shuttle cockpit photos