Torrential rainfall stalled the morning commute to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston today but work otherwise is proceeding without problems, space agency officials said.
Major highways in and around Houston were shut down after about 10.5 inches of rain fell by the height of the morning rush hour, according to an Associated Press report. Almost six inches fell in just 75 minutes near Hobby Airport, flooding Interstate 10 and other major traffic arteries in the area.
The airport, which is about a half-hour north of the NASA center, closed for more than two hours because employees couldn't get through flooded roadways. Numerous school districts called off classes.
According to the AP, the Houston Fire Department reported about a dozen high-water rescues of motorists in southeastern Houston. In some places, drivers tried to push stalled vehicles from knee-deep water. Others couldn't even reach their vehicles as the water rose to the doors.
JSC is the home of NASA's Mission Control Center, where ground controllers maintain a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year vigil on the International Space Station. U.S. astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov currently are living and working on the outpost some 220 miles above Earth.
The center also is home to NASA's astronaut corps and a variety of research laboratories and training facilities associated with the U.S. human space flight program.
The heavy rain slowed the morning commute for some of the center's 17,500 federal and contractor employees, but work otherwise was proceeding as scheduled.
"Some people came in late, but it hasn't impacted operations," JSC spokesman Kyle Herring said.
The flooding is not expected to cause any delay in NASA preparations for the scheduled July 1 launch of shuttle Discovery on the agency's second post-Columbia test flight.
Image note: Click to enlarge this AP image of a motorist guiding his truck through a flooded intersection. Photo credit: Ap photographer David J. Phillip.
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