Saving the shuttle simulator—“It was an artifact that needed to be preserved”

Enlarge / The cockpit of the restored space shuttle motion simulator. (credit: Carl Brainerd)

Every NASA astronaut who ever rode aboard the space shuttle, more than 350 of them, first sat in its full-motion simulator. And even though the simulator was firmly on the ground, anchored inside Building 5 at Johnson Space Center, it offered one hell of a ride.

"It was absolutely identical to what we flew," says Bonnie Dunbar, a former NASA astronaut who launched on the space shuttle five times from 1985 to 1998. "It rolled over on its back. It would vibrate as if you were going through a launch and landed like a shuttle entry. If you wanted to go into space, you had to pass the training in the motion simulator."

After the space shuttle was retired in 2011, artifacts from the program were sent across the country to various museums. Precious little of the shuttle actually remained in Texas, where the program was managed and its astronauts were trained. Texas A&M University sought to keep the full-motion space shuttle simulator, however. The chair of the aerospace engineering department at Texas A&M, Dimitris Lagoudas, led the effort to raise $500,000 and move the simulator to the university's campus in 2012.

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