User:Craigboy/Neutral buoyancy pool

A neutral buoyancy pool is a pool used to train astronauts for extravehicular activity and the development of procedures. These pools began to be used in the 1960s and were initially just recreational swimming pools, dedicated facilities would later be built.

=Space Agencies=

NASA
Prior to May 1960, NASA recognized the possibility of underwater neutral buoyancy simulations and began testing its efficacy. NASA engaged Environmental Research Associates, a company in Baltimore, to try neutral buoyancy simulations first in a pool near Langley Research Center. Visitors and other issues disturbed those efforts, and they moved the operation to a swimming pool at the McDonogh School in Maryland, where Scott Carpenter was the first astronaut to participate suited. Then, after difficult EVAs through Gemini 11 in mid-September 1966, the Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed the Johnson Space Center) fully understood the importance of testing procedures underwater and sent the Gemini 12 crew to train at McDonogh.

Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) (1967-1997)
Opened in 1967 and was located at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, Alabama, USA. The facility had three tanks. The first had a diameter of 8 ft and depth of 8 ft. The second was built was added in 1966 and had a diameter of 25 ft and a depth of 15 ft. A third tank was added around 1968 for Skylab and other planned projects, it had a diameter of 75 ft and was 40 ft deep.

Training in the NBS decreased when the Johnson Space Center opened its own neutral buoyancy pool in 1980, it eventually was closed in 1997.

Weightless Environment Training Facility (WETF) (1980-1998)
WETF was located in Building 29 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The dimensions of the pool was 78 ft by 33 ft with a depth of 25 ft. It was closed in 1998.

The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) (1997-present)
In the late 1980s NASA began to consider replacing WETF which was too small to hold useful mock-ups of many of the space station components planned for Space Station Freedom, which eventually morphed into the International Space Station. NASA purchased the then processing facility from McDonnell Douglas in the early 1990s and began refitting it as a neutral-buoyancy training center in 1995.

The NBL is located at the Sonny Carter Training Facility, near the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The pool's dimensions are 202 ft by 102 ft with a depth of 40 ft.

Roscosmos
Following the Voskhod 2 mission, a group at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) proposed to train for EVAs in a pool. In September 1969, GCTC created a working group to further study the idea and some experiments are done in their swimming pool near the end of the year. In 1970, cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov visited NASA's new 75 ft diameter pool at Marshall. Sevastyanov was even allowed to don a training suit and enter the pool. Following the visit, further interest within the Soviet space program began to grow to have a similar facility. In November 1973, it was officially decided to construct a dedicated pool; until then the center's swimming pool would continued to be used.

Hydro Lab (1980-present)
Hydro Lab was completed in early 1980, the pool there has a diameter of 23 m and a depth of 12 m.

CNSA
A neutral buoyancy pool is located at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing, it has a diameter of 23 m and depth of 10 m.

Neutral Buoyancy Facility (NBF)
The NBF is located at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany. It has an unusually shape and roughly the dimensions of 22 m by 17 m with a depth of 10 m.

Weightlessness Environment Test System (WETS) (1997-2011)
WETS was located at the Tsukuba Space Center in Ibaraki, Japan. It opened in 1997 and closed in 2011 due to extensive earthquake damage. The pool there had a diameter of 16 m and depth of 10.5 m.

=Others=

University of Maryland
The Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility (NBRF) is located at the University of Maryland in the United States. The pool there has a diameter of 50 ft and a depth of 25 ft. It was built in 1992 and is touted as the "only neutral buoyancy facility on a college campus". The NBRF is part of the Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) which was originally a part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It split from MIT when the SSL was awarded a grant from NASA to build a dedicated neutral buoyancy pool. Since there was not enough space at MIT for the pool, it decided to move SSL to the University of Maryland. =Images=

=See Also=
 * Neutral buoyancy
 * Neutral buoyancy simulation as a training aid

=References=