HOUSTON, TX—Talk to an astronaut about their training to fly in space and it won’t be long before they mention "Building 9." That’s the common way of referring to the particular structure at Houston’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) that houses the SVMF, or the "Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility," which is without a doubt one of the coolest places on Earth for a space geek to visit.

It’s been high on my list of places to see for many years, and Ars was granted access shortly before the last major pieces of space shuttle training hardware were removed. With former astronaut Mike Bloomfield as our guide, we crawled and climbed all through the Crew Compartment Trainer II, a life-sized mock-up of the space shuttle’s forward compartment. We took a lot of pictures.

The SVMF

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The facility is located inside an enormous warehouse on the JSC campus. The T-shaped structure’s main feature is the SVMF high-bay itself, which is oriented northwest-southeast and capped at the southeast end by an enormous pair of sliding doors (used to install or remove mock-ups). Permanently mounted to ceiling rails inside the high-bay is a pair of enormous overhead cranes for moving equipment around.

The configuration of mock-ups in the SVMF changes with some regularity for various training tasks. The mock-ups housed in the SVMF are usually "high fidelity," meaning that they closely resemble the actual vehicles and components that will be launched into space. The Crew Compartment Trainer II, which we toured, was such a mock-up. It featured the exact interior layout of an actual space shuttle, but the controls were inert and non-functional (with a few exceptions like the switches for cabin lighting).

At the time of our tour, the SVMF featured a high-fidelity mock-up of the International Space Station and a Soyuz. Several sections of the building were dedicated to specific training tasks—there was a life-sized SSRMS mock-up (the Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System—the shuttle’s "arm"), for example, along with a number of other training setups.

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The CCT2 mid-deck

Mike Bloomfield and I entered the CCT2 through the side hatch and stood on the "mid-deck," the area below the shuttle’s cockpit where the crew typically ate and slept. This is where as many as three of the shuttle’s crew had to ride out launch and re-entry (without any windows!).

The mid-deck was small. Three adult humans—Bloomfield, my photographer Steve, and I—took up most the available space just standing around; getting positioned so that Steve could take photos of us was often an exercise in shifting and elbowing. Bloomfield explained that the mid-deck only becomes roomy in the microgravity environment of low earth orbit, where suddenly all the available nooks and crannies become accessible.

The forward wall of the mid-deck is taken up by supply lockers that are used to hold things the crew needs for the mission, including snacks. Bloomfield smiled as he pointed out the drawer at the very top where the snacks were kept (typical items you’d find anywhere, like potato chips and candy), saying that the snack drawer was often the first thing on any given mission to run dry.

To the left of the lockers was the food prep station, which contained a small oven and potable water dispenser (for both drinking water and for rehydrating meals), and then to the left of that, along the aft wall, was the toilet compartment.

Every available surface, from floor to ceiling, was covered in strips of velcro—something that not every space movie gets right. Small items tend to float away in microgravity, so astronauts request that velcro be affixed to just about every blank surface so they can fix things like books, pens, and eating utensils in place.

(In spite of how it burned in the Apollo 1 fire, velcro isn’t a significant fire hazard. The space shuttle kept its cabin pressurized to an Earth-normal 14.7 psia with a mix of about 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, and under those conditions velcro is not flammable. It only burned on the Apollo 1 fire because the Apollo 1 command module was at the time filled with pure oxygen at 16.7 psia—conditions that can turn even flame-retardant materials into potential ignition sources.)

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The CCT2 flight deck

Bloomfield, Steve, and I clambered up a tiny cramped ladder through a tiny cramped accessway in the mid-deck’s ceiling and found ourselves on the flight deck. This was even more crowded than the mid-deck—though, again, it would have been considerably less cramped had we been in microgravity.

The forward portion of the flight deck is taken up by the shuttle pilot and commander’s seats (commander on the left, pilot on the right), with the cockpit’s instrumentation spread out on all sides much like a jet airliner. The forward windows are surprisingly small, and visibility dead ahead is limited to a very narrow section of the window. Both the pilot and commander have fighter-style HUDs (heads-up displays), which are used mainly during landing to keep them lined up and on target with the runway.

Procedures and checklist books were scattered everywhere, even in the trainer (not surprising, considering that the CCT2 was used to familiarize astronauts with the control layouts of the shuttle). More than once I asked Bloomfield questions on how to accomplish certain tasks—How do you perform a launch abort? How do you change your orientation or orbital track?—and Bloomfield would simply pluck one of the procedure books off its velcro perch and look up the answer.

The rear of the flight deck is given over to controls that deal with the payload bay and the payload bay’s contents. The shuttle’s SSRMS arm is controlled from here, and there’s also a duplicate set of flight controls so that an astronaut can look up through the roof-mounted rendezvous windows and dock the shuttle with another vehicle like the Russian Mir or the International Space Station (shuttles equipped to dock in this fashion did so with an airlock assembly that faced upward out of the payload bay, necessitating this odd piloting position).

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Back to earth

Bloomfield walked me through a few procedures, and it was fascinating how complex the shuttles were in some areas and how primitive they were in others. The on-board computers of course received numerous updates throughout the vehicles’ lives, but even in their final iteration they wouldn’t have won any speed awards.

Probably the most interesting thing about the shuttle, and something we didn’t touch on during our CCT2 tour, is the software that runs on the vehicle’s computers. A FastCompany article from all the way back in 1996 details the meticulous way in which the shuttle’s guidance software is written; unlike a flashy AAA game or a high-profile productivity suite, development on the shuttle’s software is done under highly regulated conditions by a team that rarely, if ever, requires overtime or goes into "crunch mode." The result, amazingly enough, is a 420,000-line application that is completely bug-free.

After "landing" our shuttle—which really just involved flicking a few switches, since nothing in the cockpit was functional—we stepped back out into the SVMF high-bay. The huge expanse of ceiling yawned above us—almost dizzying after spending nearly an hour cramped in the shuttle’s cockpit pretending to fly. It’s an environment you’d think would be filled with the echoing sounds of work, but it was actually very quiet—there weren’t any simulations or training activities in progress (one of the reasons we’d been able to schedule our tour for that morning).

I took just a moment to savor the view, two stories up on a ladder, while the entirety of the life-sized International Space Station mock-up stretched out below me like the most awesome model train city in the entire world.

I love my job.