Operations and Checkout Building

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building on Merritt Island, Florida, is among the few NASA facilities where astronauts sleep before they fly. One block of its twin-block structure holds crew quarter dormitories and suit-up preparation rooms. The adjacent block is a full-scale spacecraft workshop for manufacturing and checking crewed vehicles. This five-story building stands in the Industrial Area of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. On the 21st of January 2000, it earned a place on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. What kinds of spacecraft were prepared within these walls? How did a building conceived in one era survive to serve the next? The answer begins with the name the building carried when it first opened.

  123

• 2. A Building's Shifting Names

  ›

  Construction wrapped in 1964, and the facility opened under the name Manned Spacecraft Operations Building. That name held through the Gemini and Apollo programs, when ground crews processed spacecraft for human flight. When the Space Shuttle program arrived, the name changed back to the Operations and Checkout Building. That had been the facility's name during its own planning and construction, before the first spacecraft arrived. Ground crews shortened it to the O&C, and the informal name lasted. By 1965, the facility had taken on a specialized role in Apollo mission preparation.

  2311

• 3. Testing Without Leaving Earth

  ›

  In 1965, two altitude chambers were installed in the High Bay, built to test the environmental and life support systems of Apollo spacecraft. Each chamber stood 58 feet high, with a clear working height of 28 feet inside, and measured 33 feet across its interior diameter. Both were human-rated: astronauts could operate inside them as they would inside a real spacecraft. Starting from standard conditions, each chamber could reach a simulated altitude of 250,000 feet in one hour.

  The hardware being tested was the Apollo Command/Service Module and the Lunar Module. Prime and backup crews for every crewed mission used the chambers, starting in October 1966 with Apollo 1. Apollo 1 is remembered as ill-fated. The chambers kept running for nearly another decade, through the final mission in the series: the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975. When that program ended, the building's equipment turned toward a different kind of spacecraft.

  23

• 4. After Apollo

  ›

  Spacelab science modules arrived during the 1980s and 1990s, each housed and tested at the facility before its flight aboard the Space Shuttle. By the late 1990s, some modules and trusses for the International Space Station were also checked out in the building. A major renovation lay ahead, along with the building's fourth and final name.

  23

• 5. Orion and a New Name

  ›

  On the 30th of January 2007, NASA held a ceremony at the facility to mark its transition to the Constellation program. The high bay would become the final assembly point for the Orion crew exploration vehicle. Before work could begin, the state of Florida funded the clearing of about 50 short tons of steel stands, structures, and equipment from prior programs. Renovations totaling $55 million followed, running from June 2007 through January 2009.

  When the work was done, Lockheed Martin took over as the facility's operator for Orion production. The Orion spacecraft for Artemis I completed its assembly in the building. On the 16th of January 2021, that vehicle was moved to the Multi-Payload Processing Facility. Final testing of the Orion for Artemis II also took place in the same building.

  In 2014, on the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, a ceremony gave the facility its current name: the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building. The Armstrong name was added to a building still in active use. At that point it had already outlasted every program that originally justified its construction.

  456811