The young lady appearing with me in this photo, Sandy, was, literally, the girl next door when I was in my junior and senior years in college. She invited me to visit her and her family on my trip west, and we went to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for a tour. They didn't suit us up for this photo. It's a photoshop image.
This giant swimming pool with mockups of the International Space Station in the water is the neutral buoyancy lab where the astronauts practice doing the jobs they'll have to do in space. They spend lots of time here, and there are scuba divers always present, four divers to each astronaut, to rescue the astronauts if they get into trouble while under water. The control rooms in the upper left of the photo are mockups of the control rooms the astronauts talk to while in space.
This is the real control room for the International Space Station.
This is a real time image that came down from a video camera on the outside of the International Space Station while our tour group was watching from the peanut gallery.
This is the control room where they did the Apollo missions. When they made the movie, Apollo 13, they took lots of photos of this room so they could make their control room set look like this. Unfortunately, there were some plaques about Space Shuttle Missions on the wall, and the movie people duplicated those on the Apollo 13 set even though there was no space shuttle at the time of the Apollo 13 mission.
