ND Space Grant Consortium hosts open house for spacecraft simulator facility The North Dakota Space Grant Consortium (NDSGC) has installed a spacecraft simulator at UND and is hosting an open house Tuesday, Dec. 4, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in 162 Ryan Hall. The public is invited to attend. The spacecraft simulator was designed and constructed by UND students in the Departments of Space Studies, Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. Funds were provided through a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Pablo de Leon, research associate in the Department to Space Studies, is the principal investigator for the project. The spacecraft simulator will simulate launch, orbital operations and landings of Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz and Orion, NASA’s newly designed Crew Exploration Vehicle. The simulator will be used for academic and research purposes by students enrolled in life science, aviation, orbital mechanics and engineering classes. It will be available on a limited basis for visitors to the UND campus. The simulator is the approximate size of the original Apollo Command Module that took American astronauts to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It can accommodate three people at a time. A second spacecraft simulator is currently being designed at UND which will simulate horizontal launches such as that of Spaceship One which was the first privately built spacecraft to reach space in 2004. -- Karen Ryba, director of communications, aerospace, ryba@aero.und.edu, 777-4761