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| From environment to interface. Mission Specialist Gregory J. Harbaugh (in hoist) visits with wife Carol and daughters Kelly Allison and Dana Claire (in baby carrier), before being lowered into pool for extravehicular activity (EVA) training, 1990. Courtesy NASA. | |
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| Weightless Environment Training Facility, Building 29 |
| Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory |
| Building 9 |
| Building 32 |
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Isolated from their surroundings, campus buildings are instead fed by a series of systems: an interface, instead of an environment. Some replacements are so familiar and commonplace that it seems out of place to draw attention to them here: air conditioning instead of weather, computer displays instead of direct viewing.
But at JSC, this replacement process seems an obvious outgrowth of a larger strategy -- the series of remote controls and tools NASA has developed to direct vehicles and experiments in space can also be instituted on earth.
Natural hazards on this site -- which subsided as much as five feet and became prone to flooding before the big switch from ground water to surface water in the 1970s -- are deflected, managed, and diverted. The only water most workers need concern themselves with is what comes in through the pipes.
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| Water outdoors. Parking lot drain in the rain, lot J-1, 1996. Photo by the author. | |
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| |  | | | Water indoors. Hot and chilled water pipes, Building 5, 1996. Photo by the author. |
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|  | | | Local practice, remote control. Panel for remote manipulator arm mockup, Weightless Environment Training Facility, Building 29, 1996. Photo by the author. |
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|  | | | Connecting to the rest of the world. Service tunnel to Mission Control under construction, 1963. Courtesy JSC Archives, Woodson Research Center, Rice University. |
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