Playing Tourist

The multi-week training session I’m currently going through included (in the first week) a fair number of tours to see the highlights of the local space-related environs.  It was fun to see places I had not visited since 2000, and there were certainly plenty of changes since then.  Others I’d not seen before, which were fun as well.  Here are some photos:

These two are in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which is the big pool used for training for space walks (EVAs) and such.  

This is an old trainer for the toilet on the Shuttle.  It's not the plumbed one you could actually use, but is the one that just had a closed-circuit camera (with a monitor facing you, just right of the picture as shown here), so you could check your alignment/aim before doing the deed for real on the plumbed one. 

In the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility you can see all manner of contraptions, including Shuttle and Station simulators and a concept vehicle for a pressurized-cabin rover, and a Soyuz vehicle.

It was interesting to be in a Shuttle trainer once again, after many long years.  For some reason the phrase "kick out the jams" came to mind.

“A gent that lives on his brain is simply turning daydreams into money.”
~Colonel Dangerfield, “Destry Rides Again” by Max Brand