Neutral buoyancy pool

Prior to May 1960, NASA recognized the possibility of underwater neutral buoyancy simulations, and began testing their efficacy.

Visitors and other issues disturbed those efforts, so they moved the operation to a swimming pool at the McDonogh School in Maryland, where Scott Carpenter was the first astronaut to participate suited.

Training in the NBS decreased when the Johnson Space Center opened its own neutral buoyancy pool in 1980, it eventually was closed in 1997.

[5] WIF was used for the Gemini and Apollo programs and was located in Building 5 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

NASA purchased the then-processing facility from McDonnell Douglas in the early 1990s, and began refitting it as a neutral-buoyancy training center in 1994 with construction ending in December 1995.

[7] The NBL is located at the Sonny Carter Training Facility, near the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

[9] In September 1969, GCTC created a working group to further study the idea, and some experiments were performed in their swimming pool near the end of that year.

[9] In 1970, cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov visited NASA's new 23 meters (75 ft)-diameter pool at Marshall.

[18] The NBRF is part of the Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) which was originally located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

[18] It split from MIT when the SSL was awarded a grant from NASA to build a dedicated neutral buoyancy pool.

[21][22] One disadvantage of neutral-buoyancy diving as a simulation of microgravity is the significant amount of drag created by the water.