Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center

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Front gate of Johnson Space Center.

An aerial view of the complete Johnson Space Center facility of Houston in 1989. A portion of Clear Lake can be seen at the top of the view.

The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight activities, and is located in southeast Houston, Texas (originally Clear Lake, Texas). It was built on land donated by Rice University.

JSC is home to Mission Control Center (MCC-H), the NASA control center that coordinates and monitors all human spaceflight for the United States. MCC-H directs all Space Shuttle missions and activities aboard the International Space Station. It is also in charge of the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which serves as a backup Shuttle landing site and as the coordinating facility for the upcoming Project Constellation program, which will replace the Space Shuttle program after 2010.

NASA's astronaut training is conducted at JSC at the Sonny Carter Training Facility, which includes the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a very large pool containing about 6.2 million gallons of water where astronauts train to practice extra-vehicular activity tasks while attempting to simulate weightlessness. Around 3,000 civil servants, including 110 astronauts, are employed at JSC. The bulk of the workforce are the over 15,000 civil servants and contractors. Over 15 contracting firms work at JSC; the largest is the United Space Alliance, which accounts for about 40 percent of the JSC employees. As of November 2005 the center director is former astronaut Michael Coats. Michael Coats is the tenth director at JSC, the first being Robert Gilruth.

One of the artifacts displayed at Johnson Space Center is the Saturn V rocket. It is whole, except for the ring between the S-IC and S-II stages, and the fairing between the S-II and S-IVB stages, and made of actual surplus flight-ready articles. It also has a real, flight-ready Apollo CSM, intended to fly in the cancelled Apollo 19 mission.

1 History
2 Building Numbers
3 Culture
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

Space Shuttle Challenger, atop its Boeing 747 SCA, flying over JSC

NASA's center in Houston has its origins in legislation shepherded to enactment in 1958 by then-U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who was from Texas. Then called simply the Manned Spacecraft Center, it was opened in 1961 was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973, the year Johnson died.

By 1965, JSC was fully operational and has been responsible for coordinating and monitoring every crewed NASA mission since Gemini 4 in 1965.

In addition to housing NASA's astronaut operations, JSC is also the site of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where the first astronauts returning from the moon were quarantined, and where the majority of lunar samples are stored.

The visitor's center of JSC is Space Center Houston.

[edit] Building Numbers

The buildings at Johnson Space Center are all numbered and not named. A partial listing of building numbers and what is contained in them follows:

Building 1 - Headquarters of JSC, including offices of senior management and the JSC director.
Building 2 - Public Affairs Office, including video production and audio processing facilities.
Building 4 - Office building of many manned spaceflight activities, including astronauts and flight directors.
Building 5 - Includes the Shuttle Mission Simulator (SMS), both fixed-base and motion-based.
Building 8 - Health Clinic and historical photo and video archives.
Building 9 - Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF), including full-scale International Space Station module mockups and several Space Shuttle cabin and payload bay mockups.
Building 12 - Incudes, among other things, JSC's Office of Education, which specializes in promoting Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) across the country.
Building 30 - Contains the Mission Control Center (MCC) including the Flight Control Rooms (FCRs) to support the Space Shuttle and ISS.
Building 31 - Includes two vacuum chambers for testing flight hardware.
Building 37 - Includes the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.

[edit] Culture

NASA Civil Servants are issued badges with gold color markings while contractors badges have black markings, leading to the popular terms "Gold Badges" and "Black Badges".