recently Ariel Simone and I spent a few days visiting NASA Ames Research Center
located right in our back yard in the heart of Silicon Valley Ames has been
around since 1939 and it's where NASA conducts research and development of the
technology and science used in missions ranging from small satellites to Rovers
to crewed flights aerial actually got her start and space exploration by
unexpectedly landing a job at NASA Ames a few years ago working on a program
whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside of NASA to
collaborate she was really excited to show us some of her favorite parts of
Ames and explore some areas she'd never seen before as well for Simone and I
this first visit to Ames was our chance to get a sense of what goes on in this
massive facility that spans over 200 acres its history and how they're
working on the future of space exploration we were especially curious
about the big testing facilities inside Ames the kind of larger-than-life
machines simulators and testing rigs we've only seen in documentaries in
movies one of those is the vertical motion simulator a 10 story tall tower
with a multi-axis computer-controlled gantry that can accurately recreate the
experience of what it's like to command and pilot a spacecraft astronauts have
used it extensively in their training from practice shuttle flights to moon
landings we were keen to try out our amateur astronaut skills and see if we
could steer a lunar lander onto the surface of the Moon without crashing
I'm submitting a grid and I'm on the average team here at NASA Ames Research
Center's simulation laboratories and so what we're standing in right now is part
of the simulation labs where we can do flight simulation and all aspects
something's from the pilots point of view two air traffic controllers point
of view and really get a full picture in that way so so there are a couple main
reasons that we simulate and one of those is economics obviously it's a lot
cheaper to build a plane and simulation as opposed to creating it in real life
and then being able to test it afterwards so so there's a safety factor
too so the two main reasons would be economics and safety
the yellow brick road but to science
if so so lucky cousins hallway on the sides of see these posters and they show
several of the research studies that have been done here over the years
they going through the pass used to be the dividuals before we have made a
really good visual system that we today we have it's a model Morgan and so these
people are actually painting on here and there's going to be a camera in real
time along with cwever it's completely analog relay of a map
what if the cops and that's on there right now
what we're hoping is that for future studies that will be part of the artists
mission that we may use and build on that research whiteboard
so now an aerial we're inside the motion simulator actually try it at temple and
I feel like this gets Simone one step closer to space yeah I mean it's
definitely I mean considering that 350 astronauts have been through here I feel
like some of it should rub off on you yes but also I kind of do some I crash
things you're not going to try for a successful landing I just I want to feel
it move make it move I sound like a kid at the zoo like dad make it well you
want to get your 50 cents 400 simulator shot hearing why use it for anything
else that did fuck it up what you'll see here are what we call the flight
director so these magenta lines that are going over here and over here you're
going to try to keep that that that little black dot in the center of these
two lines so that's your aim so you're gonna try to take this over to here so
glad she's going first Simone has no idea that we can hear what she's saying
and also see how she's performing in the simulator so this just officially became
a contest I'm gonna lose there she goes
oh my god oh my god so I've been here a bunch of times but I've never actually
gotten to fly the vertical motion simulator so I'm pretty psyched right
now
can I stop doing well
she landed members yeah I wanted to our team proud an America proud
Aereo there cuz there's the earth making her nervous thinks it's not what I want
to hear you hear Aldrin say yikes little journey around the moon I'm at 70 feet
closing in oh my god he's okay I do not think norm is winning the contest
between the three of us made it back to earth
it landed on the moon in a skirt Simone did the best of all of us clearly the
most promising astronaut candidate on our team my more aggressive piloting
style didn't help with the landing but let me appreciate the kind of realistic
forces the VMS was able to simulate by operating in such a large space
something more realistic than any theme park ride or virtual reality experience
I've tried another really fantastic simulator at Ames that we got to see is
the 20g centrifuge named for its ability to give you up to 20 times the force of
Earth's gravity you've seen this kind of machine before in sci-fi a subject gets
trapped in and spun around the centrifuge at incredible speed to test
their endurance and cognitive abilities under simulated g-forces sadly we didn't
get to ride this simulator at speed but we did get to enter the centrifuge
chamber and get up close to this incredible piece of machinery we are
inside NASA's 20 G centrifuge we're human and this is one of those iconic
pieces of equipment you see in the kind of space films where astronauts in
training have to sit at the end of a centrifuge and get g-forces simulated on
them up to in this facility humans up to 12 G but this can actually go simply
that's nuts apparently it gets really really hard to
breathe that like for because it compresses your chest and you're kind of
just like panting so the perspective you have right now is where a test subject
would be and for something like 4G this whole this would rotate at 20
revolutions per minute which is fast but they would flip down the door so you
would have to look at the room yes yes thankfully gameplay very logic this is
an amazing piece of equipment yeah I was lucky I was sort of the main test dummy
for a lot of this work and so I got to go up to six G's
and at 6 G's you're 6 6 times heavier but your chest is really heavy and
you're just focusing on breathing so it's every breath is is really difficult
to take and so you're just hoping it's done pretty soon so yeah so that was on
a long time ago it was on a pseudo Mars mission so the tests we did were for
constellation and that was the Ares rocket and the Orion capsule and so they
were going to go up to 4 G's which is
enough the cool thing about this is that I don't know if you a lot of the
military centrifuges and a lot of other human centrifuges you have this little
cockpit you sit in this is a giant room and so you we can do whatever we want in
this room including moving it closer or farther or with whatever we want to do
our experiments so actually in one experiment they had people live in here
with the toilet and everything to measure long-term effects of low G
levels yeah yes I don't know doctor poor thing yes yes how long would that
session they went a couple of days yeah that's why they had a toilet toilet and
everything I don't know the details of that of those studies that was that was
before my time a rocket is just a long tube right so it's just a giant tube and
just like a flew it has a resonance frequency and so it turned out that the
resonant frequency of the Ares rocket which was the previous one to what we
have now was 12 Hertz and it turned out that as the fuel burnt it shedded you
know it's gonna burn on evenly and it started oscillating at 12 Hertz so it
was shaking the rocket up and down at 12 Hertz quite a bit and so it was one of
the number one constellation risks and so
they asked us to see what would happen the crew was very concerned about what
they'd be able to do well when they were when they were launching and so what our
job was was to do some experiments to see if they if they could read the
displays operate the controls and stuff how's it feel norm
I mean claustrophobic a little bit these panels here or displays yeah so this is
for testing so let's come over here so we shut this and you're perfectly
comfortable and it starts accelerating and so the G vector now is here right
gravity is going here and as you're spinning right it push it pushes G there
right so so what she will show you what happens to your perceived G vector and
so what does he feel like he yeah and it's just an amazing feeling and we
angled the chair so that at 3.8 G which is what we wanted to test you feel like
you're lying flat on your back
we had just one more stop to make on our first day at games and that would be
checking out one of the most imposing structures on campus the world's largest
wind tunnel so apparently this is largest wind tunnel I think in all of
Earth this is we're looking at the air intake of this large wind tunnel and
this all compresses down into an 80 foot by 120 foot room I believe where they
can test full air planes and everything like this wind tunnel has gotten a whole
lot of use by NASA by commercial aviation by everything so what you're
literally looking at is it's sucking in all this air to power the wind tunnel
through that intake right there so this is the largest wind tunnel and it's
pretty awesome it's one of many wind tunnels on campus yeah so there are
multiple wind tunnels here at NASA Ames this one gets used by both NASA and
other industries the other wind tunnels are more dedicated use for NASA they're
smaller but they can do more dedicated tests for different flight instruments
and things of that nature and it just has this really weird shape love it what
is this a wind tunnel for Giants
you