An Educator's Perspective
Texas A&M University will soon have a new attraction for current students and researchers to use and learn from, and for space enthusiasts to visit, when the NASA Shuttle Mission Simulator (SMS) opens to the public in summer 2013.
This opportunity wouldn't have come about without NASA's Paul S. Hill '84, director of Mission Operations at NASA Johnson Space Center. Hill contacted us about this great opportunity to bring this one-of-a-kind experience to Texas A&M so that current and future students could benefit from this, see how engineering is done in the real world, see how NASA prepared astronauts to fly into space, and see a big part of the history of the U.S. space program.
NASA built this simulator in the late 1970s, and it operated daily until 2011. Every astronaut who has trained to fly the space shuttle has flown this simulator. This sophisticated tool—the only device of its kind—trained astronauts to use the space shuttle to launch into space and fly back to Earth.
We plan to restore the simulator to the way it was when the last mission flew in July 2011. Those astronauts who flew that last mission will be able to come to Texas A&M, sit in the simulator and say, "That's exactly how I remember it." It's going to be a time capsule, frozen in time so that everyone who comes to see it and fly it will get to experience a piece of space history.
And it's living history. Unlike a typical museum display, where you look at exhibits and read a placard, this is history that you actually get to interact with. You'll get to sit in it, fly it and run the full simulation exactly how the NASA astronauts did.
The simulator will also complement our education and research efforts in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Our Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory has simulators for a variety of aircraft, from general aviation to large commercial air transports, such as the Boeing 787, to various types of military aircraft, such as the F-35 Lightning II. The SMS is also a flight simulator, but of a space vehicle. So the basics are the same—the dynamics, the atmospheric models, the cockpit, all the interfaces and displays for the pilots—but the SMS is specialized for space travel.
You'll get to sit in it, fly it and run the full simulation exactly how the NASA astronauts did.
Several courses in aerospace engineering and other engineering departments will use the simulator—for example, evaluating cockpit–human factors or studying flight mechanics or guidance, navigation, and control. For some courses, we envision creating laboratory sections in which students will use the simulator as part of their work. The SMS will also be available to faculty and students for research, in addition to companies, organizations or individuals who wish to conduct research under contract. Public school students and teachers will also have ample opportunity to experience the SMS.
And this opportunity wouldn't be happening without the dedicated students of Texas A&M. Right now they're doing inventory and helping with site preparation. Students in aerospace engineering honors classes have been working up lesson plans for K–12 teachers and for aerospace engineering courses and laboratory sections at Texas A&M. Members of the Texas A&M chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space are designing the SMS Experience, an immersive experience for the facility, to include everything from selecting the pictures on the wall to the videos shown in the waiting-area monitors to the music playing over the loudspeaker. We want the shuttle simulator experience to be as good as visitors expect it to be, and better.
Approximately 1,000 people each year visit the Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory on campus to fly the simulators, but I anticipate that visits to the SMS will easily exceed that number. And that's what we want: to make this facility available to the public to see, interact with and learn from. I've already been contacted by people all over the country who want to plan their summer vacations around bringing the