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(Roar of rocket engines)
NARRATOR: Since before the Space Shuttle’s first launch in 1981,
every astronaut flight crew has come to Ames Research Center to practice
the final stage of a Shuttle mission: “landing and rollout.”
The crews fly the Vertical Motion Simulator, the world’s largest and most realistic simulator of its kind.
Also known as the VMS, it uses six degrees of freedom – up and down, side to side, tilt and spin –
in a 60-foot high by 40-foot wide area to simulate the Shuttle landing’s sequence with a high degree of accuracy.
High-resolution out-the-window views, combined with a realistic sensation of flying,
enable astronauts to practice a variety of emergency and non-emergency landing scenarios at almost any runway in the world.
CHRIS FERGUSON: “There is nothing that comes close to what the VMS,
the Vertical Motion Simulator, can do for us.
It gives us the sense of dynamics, the accelerations, the various motions that you get,
the wallowing that the Shuttle does as soon as it lands on the runway,
the de-rotation when the nosegear hits the ground, you feel the thwack, the thump when the nosegear,
the tracking of the centerline maintenance task we have to do.
What you rely on is rote memorization and repetition and coming out here every year
and doing the VMS is the one tool that gives us that.
In my first landing, in STS-126, we landed at Edwards Air Force Base,
on one of the shorter and narrower runways the Shuttle has ever landed on.
We touched down, just about on condition, we did our de-rotation and one of my habits was,
as soon as the nose gear touches the ground, I look to the left or right and look for a runway remaining marker.
That’s the amount of runway that’s left until the end…there is no more runway!
And typically, we see in the Space Shuttle, about eight to nine thousand feet.
Well, on my actual landing, we were at 5000-feet remaining and that is very unusual.
So, at that exact moment in time, I was back in the VMS and I knew what I had to do
in order to get the Shuttle stopped in the remaining runway and it was just an instantaneous flashback.
And that’s exactly what you want in a good training tool: something for that moment in time, when you have to react,
you can’t think, you can relay right back to some training that you had and actually put yourself in that position,
right then and there and it felt exactly like being in the VMS for remainder of the landing and rollout.
FERGUSON ON RADIO: Wheels stop, Houston.
MISSION CONTROL ON RADIO: Copy…wheels stop, Endeavour. Welcome back. That was a great way to finish a fantastic flight, Fergie.
NARRATOR: As the Space Shuttle program comes to an end, the Vertical Motion Simulator will be continue to be
a valuable training tool for pilots to test new designs, validate engineering studies and fly to as-yet undiscovered destinations.
(Roar of rocket engines)