NASA Opens Its First Major New Wind Tunnel in Over 40 Years
The 20-foot chamber at a Virginia facility will push air past 100 mph to test hardware for future space missions
By Ada "Peer-Review" Sparks
The last time NASA built a wind tunnel of this scale, the Voyager probes were still on the drawing board. Now the agency has switched on a new one — its first major addition to that testing fleet in more than four decades, according to Fox News.
The tunnel, built at a Virginia facility, measures 20 feet in diameter and stands 24 feet tall. Engineers can drive wind speeds inside it up to 117 miles per hour, fast enough to simulate the aerodynamic stresses that spacecraft components and other flight hardware face before they ever leave the ground.
Wind tunnels remain one of engineering's oldest tricks for a reason: they let researchers watch how air moves around a real object, at real speed, before committing to a launch. NASA says this one will help test technology destined for future space missions, though the agency's statement, as relayed by Fox News, did not specify which programs will use it first or what the facility cost to build.
That's worth flagging. A new national test facility is a genuine event for the aerospace research community, but the reporting here traces to a single outlet summarizing a NASA announcement. Independent aerospace engineers have not yet weighed in publicly on what this tunnel adds that existing NASA and industry facilities — including tunnels at Ames and Langley — do not already provide. Nor is it clear yet what test data, if any, has come out of it so far.
Still, the basic facts are concrete: a specific size, a specific top speed, a specific gap of more than 40 years since NASA last built one like it. If the agency follows through with published test results, that will be the real measure of whether this tunnel earns its keep.
Extraordinary claims. Ordinary evidence? Then no.
— Compiled from reporting by Fox News.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."