Know Everything about NASA’s Space Vehicle Mockup Facility
Space vehicle mockup facility – Imagine walking into a place that has everything that can take you to the moon, stars, and space. At first, it seems like the stuff of fiction for space fandom. But it’s true that many people are not aware of the fact that NASA has a huge mockup facility located in the Johnson Space Center. It was built in the year 1975 for astronauts and cosmonauts, but now it has become a point of attraction for the whole world.
A place where ideas transform into machines transporting you into space and beyond (like literally). Isn’t this remarkable?
To Moon and Stars – Space Vehicle Mockup Facility
There is no surprise that NASA has been ‘the first’ in so many things, and its space mockup facility is seen as a place where engineering skills marvel at their best. You’d be amazed to know the details if you are someone who is always on the lookout to create powerful and unique things using the excellence of engineering. A great engineer never jumps with a blindfold into creating anything. To kick things off, you need some sort of sketch, Wireframe, mockup, or prototype in order to visualize the design and functions.
Inside the world’s largest Mockup Vehicle Mockup Facility for Space
With a mockup facility, it is made sure to train those who will be going in space. It is also important to create full-fledged mockups of spacecraft and its other parts in order to improve efficiency and lower the risk of failure. You can design the high fidelity mockups, manufacture the prototypes and also run testing to configure the mockups for training in the facility.
So what we are going to do is to help you walk through the most enchanting global mockup facilities in the world.
Go Beyond Space – Space Vehicle Mockup Facility(SVMF)
Imagine someday in the future a space shuttle or a spacecraft will be roaming around the planets or asteroids and the idea of that very craft was conceived in the SVMF.
So we wanted to share few interesting facts with you concerning these mockups, for example:
- This space mockup facility was initially created in order to expand the ‘space shuttle program’ at a much larger scale but now it has different verticals concerning mockup development, training, and testing of space hardware, etc.
- In the year 1992, NASA aggressively ventured into the development of robotics operations and hence the increased development of mockups and prototypes started at a faster pace.
- As for now, it is also expanding more, and you can visualize the extent of it from the fact that this 200-meter long room apparently holds approximately more than 1100+ employees.
- If someday you’d get the chance to walk into the space facility, you’d see Rover prototypes and also humanoid robot mockups. It’s straight out of a STAR WARS movie.
- It is also a very futuristic approach to know that different ‘training mockups’ are used for this very purpose.
Note: It is for the convenience of the reader that we’ve gathered most of the data from the official NASA source, so you can see it here.
Space Vehicle Mockup Facility is like a kickoff for ideas that you can turn into test mockups or prototypes. You can see that it’s more of a professional mockup facility, but it is also being used as a rehabilitation center for legacy products or simply to say space artifacts. You can reconfigure and restructure the old products to upgrade them with the latest features and specifications. With this facility, you can look at the training prototypes, rover mockups, and also high fidelity mockups of the space vehicles and their important core parts in the vehicles.