Visiting Mary and NASA

After the Race for the Cure on Saturday I drove down to Nowhere, Ohio (no, silly, that's not actually the name of the town) where my marvelous friend Mary from Shazam in the Kitchen lives (you should check out her blog, those lavender cocoa cupcakes with blueberry frosting are to die for!). Nowhere, Ohio isn't terribly far from Sandusky. Sandusky is probably best known as the home to that restful, relaxing, romantic vacation spot where Buster and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary:


Yeah. Buster and I aren't so much for the romantic retreats. We spent an entire weekend at Cedar Point, America's Roller Coast. It was Great! (I snarfed that photo from the Cedar Point web site)

Anyway, I wasn't planning on talking about that. I wanted to tell you about something else in Sandusky. Yes, there are actually things in Sandusky other than chain restaurants, hotels, water parks, resorts, and touristy businesses meant to suck money from the pockets of Amazement Park visitors. Sandusky happens to be home to NASA's Plum Brook Station and this year happens to be NASA's 50th anniversary (NASA was born on October 1, 1958) and Plum Brook Station happened to have an open house this past weekend in celebration.

Now, I'm not ashamed to tell you that I'm a geek. Most people assume this means that I'm a computer geek because I make the Internet go for a living. Actually my true geeky passion is space. Space science, space travel, the history of space exploration, space fiction... I'm no expert in any of that stuff, I just like it. So Mary took me to the Plum Brook Station Open House.

Plum Brook is a 6400 acre facility located just south of Sandusky. Once upon a time it was known as Plum Brook Ordinance Works, and until the end of WWII, TNT was produced there. The igloos once used to store TNT are still there. NASA uses them to store broken office furniture, paperwork, and old testing rigs. Here's a picture of an ordinance igloo:

This photo came from a document about the Plum Brook reactor facility and the history of Plum Brook station. It's here: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4533/Plum%20Brook%20Complete.pdf.

There was more vegetation around the igloos we drove past.

The tour drove us past the cryogenic test complex where they test super cold stuff. Actually they're testing components and insulation and whatnot involved with cryogenic rocket propellant like LOx (liquid oxygen) and LH2 (liquid hydrogen). There are two parts to the cryogenic test complex. It's made up of the cryogenic propellant tank facility (K-site) and the cryogenics components laboratory (CCL). Click on the links to read about them.

We also drove past the Hypersonic Tunnel Facility (HTF) where they test rocket nozzles at Mach 5, 6 and 7 (that's really super fast -- a passenger jet usually doesn't get above Mach 0.8). If you have some background in this stuff, check out the link. Otherwise, maybe don't bother. NASA's not exactly giving a layman's explanation on this one.

The tour bus took us past this tower, as well:

(snarfed this photo from the NASA images database)

This photo is pretty old. The tower is no longer in use as a testing facility and it's fallen into a little disrepair. It used to be the E-Site missile stand. I think they used to shake payloads and missiles simulating launch conditions (I can't find info online about this -- just the picture, and I could be remembering wrong). Now the Ohio department of natural resources uses this tower to study the turkey vultures that have claimed it as their home.

We actually got off the Bus and checked out a few facilities too. The first bus stop was "B Control", a control center that I assume monitors and controls tests happening in B-2 (I'll talk about that next). The control room itself wasn't particularly exciting. There were screens up on the wall and a dozen or so workstations for the operators. In another room they had a couple 3-D demo things going on for visitors. One was a short 3-D movie talking about Mars and the Mars Rover. The other was a cool visualization of all the satellites circling the earth. There were all the geosynchronous satellites in a big ring high above the equator, and there was a dense cloud of LEO (low earth orbit) satellites. And this strange group in eccentric orbits sometimes close to the earth, sometimes far away. I had to ask what these were. The guy in charge said those were Russian satellites and they had funny orbits because Russia is so far north and those orbits kept them in a useful position above Russia for the longest period of time. Nifty!

Next we stopped at the B-2 facility, also known as the Spacecraft Propulsion Research Facility. This is, pretty much, a big pit where they test full-scale upper-stage launch vehicles. Here's a picture of a Delta III rocket stage being lowered into the testing chamber:

(photo snarfed from NASA's image database)

The testing chamber is pretty impressive when you're standing next to it.

We also got to walk through the Space Power Facility. There are actually two parts to this. The fist part we walked through is under construction and will become a vibro-acoustic testing chamber where they shake stuff and subject it to really loud noises, kinda like the vibration and noise of a rocket launch. The other part is the worlds largest space environment simulation chamber. They can seal it up and bring it down to vacuum pressures and also simulate the extreme heat and cold of space. Here's a picture of the skylab shroud in this testing facility:

(this photo and the next one also snarfed from NASA's image database)

We walked right through that room. They tested the mars rover airbags in there, too:


We exited the test chamber into the Assembly area where they get things ready for testing. They had all sorts of displays for visitors set up here.

Oh, I almost forgot. In addition to all these cool space-stuff testing facilities, old TNT bunkers, and the O-DNR turkey vulture stuff, Plum Brook also boasts a Bald Eagle's nest. There's a picture here.

So, my dear readers, next time you're riding the Raptor at Cedar Point in Sandusky, remember, just a few miles south of you there are real raptors, and real rockets, too.

Thanks, Mary, for taking me to NASA. You rock!