After cordial talks and meetings with civilian space scientists and engineers, however, Mr. Griffin cut his visit short when the military refused to let him visit the human spaceflight training facilities at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert.
XCOR is a private spaceflight research facility in Midland, Texas.
The robotic Morpheus lander, which is about the size of an SUV, was built and assembled at JSC and the facilities of private spaceflight firm Armadillo Aerospace.
The test facility consists of two complete spaceflight simulators, an aluminum-based operational arena, and a set of infrared motion tracking cameras; thus, the testbed is capable of representing space activities under circumstances prevailing on the ground.
That's 164 feet, which tops (or undercuts, rather) NASA's own 12 meter buoyancy lab, and it'll help prepare paid private astronauts for the rigors of spaceflight, along with other features of the facility, including hypobaric and hyperbaric champers, and a centrifuge for simulating high-G flight.
The unease was felt acutely in the southern U.S., where all five states ringing the Gulf of Mexico host NASA facilities involved in the agency's human spaceflight program.
Now, manned spaceflight is banal.
But human spaceflight is changing.
Nothing is straightforward in spaceflight".
Then there is human spaceflight.
Apollo 8 was Anders's only spaceflight.
