Historic Photos of NASA's Cavernous Wind Tunnels
I explore the massive wind tunnels built by NASA and its predecessor, NACA, throughout the 20th century. These cavernous facilities at Langley and Ames Research Centers tested everything from early airplanes to the Mercury capsule and Space Shuttle. While many older tunnels were demolished in the 1990s due to computer simulations, these historic images reveal the incredible scale of the engineering required to push the boundaries of flight.
The guide vanes, which formed an ellipse 58 feet high and 82 feet wide, cut across each cylindrical tube at a 45-degree angle.
- polpo
In 2014 I went to the open house event that NASA Ames had in honor of their 75th anniversary. They had the giant 80 by 120 foot wind tunnel open for viewing from the outside and I had a very hard time comprehending the visual size of it because the only scale references I had were the square lights on the ceiling. It was an experience that stuck with me. A few years prior I lived in Sunnyvale and even several miles away you could tell when it was operating because of the low rumble of sound.
- echoangle
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/05/historic-photos-of...
Magnetically levitating the model in the tunnel and measuring the forces by measuring how the magnets need to be driven to keep the model in place is pretty cool.
- yardie
The NASA Langley stability wind tunnel [0] is now part of Randolph Hall at Virginia Tech. You can visit it in Blacksburg, VA. Beautiful campus, btw. The stability tunnel is the biggest, they also have smaller hypersonic tunnels and
I worked there as a work-study student. Part of the job was wiping down the tunnel chamber after their test runs. The smoke you see used in wind tunnel videos is not actually smoke, but a white oil. And for a FWS job the pay wasn't bad, had to put on a bunny suit and crawl around tight spaces, LOL.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_Stability_Wind_T...