Local and federal leaders gathered at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton on Friday to celebrate the agency’s first major wind tunnel built in more than 40 years.
The $57-million Flight Dynamics Research Facility, or FDRF, replaces and combines the capacity of two nearby wind tunnels built nearly a century ago.
“This tunnel represents both a storied legacy and a soaring future,” NASA Langley director Trina Dyal said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “The facility has almost twice the wind speeds and five times the horsepower of its predecessors.”
Wind tunnels are “large tubes with air moving inside,” used to copy the actions of an object in flight, according to NASA. The agency uses them to study everything from small components of spacecraft to large commercial airplanes.
The new tunnel has a top wind speed of about 117 miles per hour. It is 24 feet tall and 20 feet wide, surrounded by a 25,000-square-foot facility.
The futuristic-looking building resembles a giant, concrete version of the Liberty Bell display – twin pillars flanking a sloped structure in the center.
The two older wind tunnels will be decommissioned, including the 12-Foot Low-Speed Tunnel.
It “supported major projects throughout its 86 years of service, from the transition from bi-planes to monoplanes between two world wars, through the development of supersonic aircraft,” NASA states on its website.
Some components are repurposed at the FDRF. The original wooden fan blades are also built into a wall display.
Corey Diebler, an aerospace engineer and facility manager, said the new tunnel “is not too different than, say, an indoor skydiving tunnel.”
It has several improvements on the older versions, including more uniform turbulence levels that allow for “cleaner” data, he said.
“It captures the dynamics of entry vehicles that are coming back to Earth, or going to other planets or moons that have atmospheres,” Diebler said.
At last week’s celebration, officials demonstrated by turning on the machine as NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman tossed in a small replica of the Orion capsule attached to a parachute.
The model bobbed around for a few minutes, suspended in the air as gusts gently blew it in different directions.
Langley engineers also showed off one of their “party tricks,” emptying a cup of water into the wind tunnel, which quickly dispersed the water into droplets hanging in the air like bubbles.
NASA has several projects slated for testing at the tunnel.
First up, Diebler said: the Transonic Truss-Braced Wing, in partnership with Boeing.
It’s an aircraft design featuring a long, thin wing that NASA says has the potential to reduce fuel and operational costs for future airliners.
Another aircraft to be studied is the RAVEN Subscale Wind Tunnel and Flight Test, or SWIFT, vehicle.
Ben Simmons, a research aerospace engineer at NASA Langley, pointed to an orange model sitting on a table at the FDRF.
“This is a 28% scale version of a 1,300-pound vehicle that NASA is currently building,” he said.
The technology could one day be used for an “air taxi” or package delivery drones.
It’s challenging to understand how dozens of controls and aspects of the vehicle interact with each other and their environment, Simmons said. The wind tunnel helps them more quickly develop mathematical modeling.
“If you apply traditional test techniques, it would take human lifetimes to be able to test a vehicle of this complexity,” he said.
Another vehicle will go much farther out of this world.
NASA’s DAVINCI mission, estimated for a 2030 launch, will study Venus from above its clouds down to its surface.
Giovanny Guecha, aerodynamics descent lead, is helping design a probe that the mission’s spacecraft will release into the planet’s atmosphere to sample its chemical makeup and take high-resolution images and measurements.
Because of Venus’ high-pressure atmosphere, officials need something more like a submarine than an aircraft, Guecha said. Which is why the probe “looks kind of like a spherical Death Star.”
The more powerful wind speeds of the new tunnel can help test more stressful conditions closer to Venus’ surface, he said.
Understanding Venus is important because it has a large concentration of carbon dioxide, giving us a window into an extreme version of the greenhouse gas effect, Guecha said.
“There's a lot of parallels of a planet that is pretty much the same size, and it has an atmospheric composition that is different, but it has similar components,” he said. “We can understand a little bit of what may happen if we don't take care of our planet.”
Hundreds of employees and dignitaries gathered at Langley for the celebration Friday.
Sen. Mark Warner acknowledged the past couple of years have “been rough” for federal employees.
“We lost too many folks at NASA, some of your best colleagues,” he said to the crowd. “The fact that we are now rebuilding that and bringing more people in is, I think, of enormous benefit.”
Dyal said the Trump administration “challenged us to move at an accelerated pace.”
The tunnel “absolutely has the demand, and we're now providing the supply.”
