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The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight located in southeast Houston, Texas. It was built on land donated by Rice University. JSC is home to Mission Control (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. NASA's astronaut training is conducted at JSC which is also home of the Neutral Bouyancy Lab (NBL). The NBL is part of the Sonny Carter training facility and is a very large pool that contains ~6.2 million gallons of water. Astronauts train in the pool on mock-ups to practice Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) tasks while attempting to simulate a "weightless" environment. Over 15,000 civil servants and contractors are employed at JSC. There are approximately 3,000 civil servants including 110 astronauts. The bulk of the workforce is drawn from more than 50 different contractors, the largest provider is the United Space Alliance which accounts for about 40% of the JSC employees. 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. 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.
History
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". Never meant as outright insult, but everyone knows what is meant when it is said: "This room full of Gold Badges had this marathon meeting about nothing in particular." See also | ||||||||||
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