On a recent February afternoon, I strolled up to a fat, brightly painted yellow line and peered down into a clear, seemingly bottomless pool. Like the mythical sirens of the Homeric Age, the water called to me. As if he read my mind, Kurt Otten hurriedly called out to me. “Please don’t jump in, because this would be the last day on my job."

Fortunately for the facility manager, I didn’t. But it was hard not to be tempted by the beautiful, blue depths before me. Hotels, health clubs, and other facilities often brag about possessing an Olympic-size swimming pool. That’s cute. At 202 feet in length, a depth of 40 feet, and a total of 6.2 million gallons, about ten Olympic swimming pools would fit into the NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or NBL.

There’s one very good reason why the pool was built so big—it had to accommodate segments of the International Space Station during assembly. Before astronauts flew to the station aboard the shuttle, crews would spend exhausting “runs” inside the pool, wearing a combination of weights and flotation devices to simulate the weightlessness of orbit. Then they would practice whatever aspects of station construction there were to do in space.



Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

NASA completed construction of the space station about seven years ago. And while astronauts still conduct periodic spacewalks to repair or perform other minor work on the station, the primary focus of astronauts in space now lies inside the station, on scientific experiments in microgravity and learning about the human health effects of long-duration spaceflight.

NASA still needs the pool for these training runs, but it doesn’t need all of the massive pool, nor does it need it all of the time. So even before the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, the space agency and the pool’s contractor, Raytheon, began experimenting with allowing private companies to use the pool.

Ars recently visited the pool in southeast Houston, not far from Johnson Space Center, to see how this particular public-private partnership was working out. We came less than a month after the massive facility had celebrated its 20th anniversary. One question loomed foremost in our mind: Could the giant pool diversify enough to survive another 20 years?

No weddings

NASA conducted the first training exercise for the NBL on January 7, 1997 as astronauts prepared for the second mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Although astronauts feel the weight of their suits in the water and the water acts as a drag on motion, neutral buoyancy offers the best available analog to working in space. Like the real thing, too, it offers astronauts a grueling, six-hour workout. John Grunsfeld, who visited Hubble three times, once told me that his body ached for days after a run in the NBL.

Raytheon began offering commercial access to the pool in 2010, and has since worked with a number of oil and gas companies. Some have tested robotic equipment for subsea activities with offshore rigs, while others have trained rig employees in safe egress from helicopters transporting them to and from offshore locations.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson



Lee Hutchinson



Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

It turns out these companies aren’t so much interested in the impressive size and depth of the pool, said Randal Lindner, a senior Raytheon manager, but rather its capabilities. The pool is well instrumented, with multiple cameras, underwater communications, dive gear, and several on-site control rooms. The facility has 40 professional divers to support operations.

At present, NASA uses the facility for about three dive runs a week, and the pool’s commercial end is used about three days. But there remains considerably more capacity for private activity, and NASA has asked Raytheon to do additional marketing to bring in more customers. Every commercial dollar allows the space agency to offset the multimillion-dollar annual expense of the NBL. Johnson Space Center isn't alone in this, of course. Private companies like SpaceX have taken over launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. Movies are now made at NASA's rocket factory in Michoud, Louisiana. And so on.

For this massive pool, the time to find new users is now. Otherwise, it's not clear what will happen to the NBL in a decade or so. As it looks to expand human activity into deep space, NASA has indicated that it will end its participation in the space station program in 2024, or likely 2028 at the latest. The space agency plans to build a deep space habitat for testing near the Moon, but that facility will certainly be much smaller than the space station. NASA won’t need such a large pool.

Will customers come to use the pool and its myriad capabilities? So far, Lindner said the NBL has been able to accommodate all the varied requests of those with interest in using the pool. Lights can be turned out to simulate nighttime conditions. The pool can be drained 18 inches to provide modest, one-foot waves. Just don’t come for frivolity—or think about jumping in during a visit.

“We have not had anything yet that we’ve had to reject,” Lindner said. “But there’s a certain amount of prestige with this facility. It’s a NASA facility where serious work gets done. We’re not going to have an underwater wedding or anything like that.”