Historic Photos of NASA's Cavernous Wind Tunnels

dolmen•about 1 hour ago

I discovered a few years ago that a such a wind tunnel facility existed in my area (France), but at a smaller scale. I had the opportunity to visit it. The facility is about 100 years old. What amazed me is not just the facilities (they have various tunnels for different measurements), but how it adapted to customer usages through time as engineering needs evolve. One building was initially designed for seaplanes but has long ago been refurbished for other uses. Another one is used by the French cycling team which has headquarters nearby.

https://iat.cnam.fr/les-souffleries-1224762.kjsp

echoangle•about 2 hours ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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...

trebligdivad•about 3 hours ago

The 1937 construction picture with the horses is a great contrast of technologies.

dsrtslnd23•about 1 hour ago

With all the technological advances, why are wind tunnels still widely in use today (instead of pure computational approaches)?

wanda•22 minutes ago

Probably for insurance purposes.

robviren•about 3 hours ago

Reminds me of the old construction photos for nuclear reactors in the US. Astoundingly complex machines at a massive scale getting out together at what now feels like impossible speed. I can't help but feel like a Roman 100 years after the fall staring up at aqueducts wondering how anyone every built such a thing.

I'm positive someone could show me an impressive thing we built recently. I don't feel like that is my point. Im just astounded those people in that time could build what they built with the tools they had as fast as they did.

Samtidsfobiker•about 2 hours ago

We can build amazing things today too, but we have a lot higher standards and a lot more requirements than they did, which makes everything take longer time. Outside my office window an enormous new new warehouse was erected in just a few weeks, but it is just a huge box with no added extras so it can't have been very hard to do

lorislab•about 2 hours ago

One thing that changed is that modern engineering moved a lot of complexity from the construction site into the design phase. A project today may take longer because we simulate, certify, model failures, and optimize before pouring concrete. The old projects sometimes had more visible physical labor, but less computational overhead.

cucumber3732842•27 minutes ago

Engineering developed a government entwined professional licensure system and used that to capture value that was previously the domain of the construction industry.

This also introduces massive potential for bike shedding, nitpicking, stalling, etc which of course costs us all.

JKCalhoun•about 2 hours ago

Historic Photos of NASA's Cavernous Wind Tunnels

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