NASA Orion Vehicle: The Main Parachutes from the CPAS

One of NASA Orion’s main parachutes from the Capsule Parachute Assembly System, or CPAS, is lowered into the water at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The Orion CPAS team joined the Exploration Flight Test 1 recovery team and representatives of the U.S. Navy to test recovery procedures for the Orion parachutes.

The NBL is 202 feet in length, 102 feet in width, and 40 feet in depth (20 feet above ground level and 20 ft below) and holds 6.2 million gallons of water.

In addition to the current parachute recovery test the facility has been used by the Orion program to test the Crew Module Uprighting system on a full size Orion mockup known as PORT.

Image Credit: NASA/James Blair

NASA NBL: JAXA Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and Suni Williams

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, attired in a training version of his spacesuit, is submerged in the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) near NASA's Johnson Space Center in this image from January 2012. 

Divers assisted Hoshide in this training exercise, which is intended to help prepare him for work on the exterior of the International Space Station.

Hoshide and his Expedition 32 crew mates Suni Williams and Yuri Malenchenko are scheduled to launch aboard the Soyuz TMA-05M from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on July 14 to the station.

Image Credit: NASA