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(Roar of rocket engines)

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NARRATOR: Since before the Space Shuttle’s first launch in 1981,

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every astronaut flight crew has come to Ames Research Center to practice

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the final stage of a Shuttle mission: “landing and rollout.”

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The crews fly the Vertical Motion Simulator, the world’s largest and most realistic simulator of its kind.

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Also known as the VMS, it uses six degrees of freedom – up and down, side to side, tilt and spin –

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in a 60-foot high by 40-foot wide area to simulate the Shuttle landing’s sequence with a high degree of accuracy.

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High-resolution out-the-window views, combined with a realistic sensation of flying,

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enable astronauts to practice a variety of emergency and non-emergency landing scenarios at almost any runway in the world.

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CHRIS FERGUSON: “There is nothing that comes close to what the VMS,

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the Vertical Motion Simulator, can do for us.

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It gives us the sense of dynamics, the accelerations, the various motions that you get,

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the wallowing that the Shuttle does as soon as it lands on the runway,

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the de-rotation when the nosegear hits the ground, you feel the thwack, the thump when the nosegear,

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the tracking of the centerline maintenance task we have to do.

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What you rely on is rote memorization and repetition and coming out here every year

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and doing the VMS is the one tool that gives us that.

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In my first landing, in STS-126, we landed at Edwards Air Force Base,

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on one of the shorter and narrower runways the Shuttle has ever landed on.

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We touched down, just about on condition, we did our de-rotation and one of my habits was,

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as soon as the nose gear touches the ground, I look to the left or right and look for a runway remaining marker.

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That’s the amount of runway that’s left until the end…there is no more runway!

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And typically, we see in the Space Shuttle, about eight to nine thousand feet.

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Well, on my actual landing, we were at 5000-feet remaining and that is very unusual.

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So, at that exact moment in time, I was back in the VMS and I knew what I had to do

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in order to get the Shuttle stopped in the remaining runway and it was just an instantaneous flashback.

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And that’s exactly what you want in a good training tool: something for that moment in time, when you have to react,

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you can’t think, you can relay right back to some training that you had and actually put yourself in that position,

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right then and there and it felt exactly like being in the VMS for remainder of the landing and rollout.

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FERGUSON ON RADIO: Wheels stop, Houston.

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MISSION CONTROL ON RADIO: Copy…wheels stop, Endeavour.  Welcome back.  That was a great way to finish a fantastic flight, Fergie.

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NARRATOR: As the Space Shuttle program comes to an end, the Vertical Motion Simulator will be continue to be