So this is a piece of old hardware.
The 6600 psi helium compressor.
So at the start of the space race, we needed to measure what we call high Reynolds number
flow, which is the way we normalize the speed
and the viscosity and the nature of the air around objects.
And one of the ways you can tweak that
is by changing the gas you're using.
And so part of that process, to get really high speed,
non-reacting gas, was to compress helium.
And so they built this marvel of compressor technology
back in the 50s and the 60s. It's now abandoned in place, but it really
is a marvel of the kind of clever engineering that they were able to do when there was that kind of big push
to know. What's that noise? Those are F-22s, 1438s.
Based on the sound, probably an F-22.
Our neighbors at Langley Air Force Base routinely
fly overhead every day as an air show.
Hey, finally, I'm not the biggest tool in the room.
Yeah, so big doors with crane access
to be able to pull stuff in and out of these lab spaces.
These are, I wouldn't say blast proof, but blast resistant.
So that if there is a mishap within the facility,
everyone is safe. And we have not had a fatality on center since the 80s.
This is my lab here. It used to have one of the big blast doors.
Sometime in the early 2000s, it was converted to office space
and then converted back to lab space. But the blast door was forever gone.
So if an explosion happens here, people might.
We don't do it. Nothing combusting happens in this lab.
Yet. Maybe today is the day.
Welcome to the, I think what we're calling the high speed flow diagnostics lab.
Wow. So this is a vacuum manifold.
It goes and connects up to all of the piping on the roof of the building that then connects to the vacuum
spheres outside. And those are pumped down to very low vacuum pressures
on the scale of millitor.
Yeah, what is it? I know what that means. But for the people who don't know what that means,
what is a millitor? A tour. Isn't that like a historical, like a half man, half bull?
That's a centaur. No, that centaur's horse.
Minotaur. Minotaur, minotaur. Millitor.
It's a millitor. Tour is a unit of pressure.
I don't know what it is in PSI off the top of my head.
But suffice to say, it's very low. It's not space vacuum, but it's such a low vacuum
as to be considered vacuum for all intents and purposes.
So when do we get to use this? We do not get to use this.
This is abandoned in place hardware.
I'm told it will be removed sometime in the 2030s.
I wish I could give timelines like that for my work.
Yeah, I'll do it in a decade. I'm going to get this recommissioned,
and so I can slap experiments on the end of it
and use the great equipment we have to do more science.
This is the only part I'm not afraid of touching. This is the part that seems normal to me.
This terrifies me. This is all pretty robust.
We dropped the power supply for these the other week.
It's still running. More like, this is a dent, but it still runs.
So this is a lab space. We have optical tables where we do kind of the core science.
There's never enough optical table space. Projects will expand to fill the optical table provided.
Always hunting for more optical tables. Then we've got a space where we can kind of resin 3D print,
tanker, design a thing, print it off,
put it on the bench top all within an afternoon,
which is a really great way for us to iterate on our ideas,
little kind of early phase things that we're seeing if there's a there, there, and do it quick, efficiently,
and precisely, which is what we'll be doing with the fan today.
This is 400 nanometer UV light. It will give you a sunburn.
Don't look directly at it. I mean, if you really want a tan, there you go.
I want a circulated sunburn back the fan off a little bit.
These are the UV lights.
We'll turn off the overheads to to get a better view.
Are there reflections of the UV light, something to worry about? Not really.
These two light, these two lights here are 400 nanometer UV lights,
which is a wavelength that is actually harmful for humans.
So we don't want to get too far in front of it. What it's doing is that it's allowing us to see this glow in the dark string.
We're recording that glow in the dark string with this 1000 FPS camera.
It's 4K 1000. 4K, how much data is that?
They spec it at 11 and change gigabits per second.
11 gigabits of data per second when you're recording at 4K 11 gigabits?
11 gigabits? If you recorded like a minute, you're almost at,
if you recorded like a minute and a half, you're at a terabyte, a terabit.
I guess it'd be eight minutes to a terabyte. Bits to bytes gives you a little bit of, you know, that eight times space to get more,
but there's a terabyte in there on the drive.
So recording at our current settings, we can get 11 seconds of data into the terabyte SSD.
We're going to go dark now? Yep. You can see the side that was pointed at the light when I was testing it,
then the side that wasn't. AmEx, your CFD code, is rendering real physics correctly.
Yeah. He makes this stuff so that they can make this stuff.
Yeah. It's making stuff all the way up.
All the way down.
It's the turtle on which the earth is supported.
This was originally built to test, to practice landing on the moon.
So they had a, you can see it in a picture right here, a practice lunar landing module,
and they would suspend it from the gantry at 16G,
and they would practice maneuvering it with jets to land.
There was a second version of this vehicle that had a big jet engine strap to the bottom,
and they tested that out at Edwards Air Force Base,
what is now the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center.
That one, there were three of them, and all but one crashed,
because it turns out when you're gimbling on top of a giant jet engine, it's not very safe.
So a lot of ejections out of that vehicle. This was a much safer, much more controlled way to practice.
You got good here before they put you on the jet engine one.
What we use it for now is very scientifically dropping things.
So now it is the... Can you hear that Linus?
The Impact Dynamics Research Facility, we fictionally call it the gantry still,
and we will throw small aircraft, space reentry capsules to test the physics of how a crash happens,
and also to verify that when we do crash or we land on land or water,
that the vehicle performs how we expected it to, that it's safe for the astronauts,
that it's safe for the occupants. We've got...
When we're doing a test out here, they've got it all pulled up and rigged up and hanging,
and it's really cool to see it go and...
And I'm sure there's a great video of that we can provide you,
both landing on ground and then we've got a pool that we built at the other end.
You've got a pool? We've got a pool. NASA's got a pool?
I wouldn't go swimming in that pool. Why not? We'd walk down to the pool.
And that's to study water landings.
And so when we tested the space shuttle, not the space shuttle,
the SpaceX capsule recently, we swung from the top of the gantry,
lofted it, and then tested the splashdown.
Have they ever missed? No.
Okay. The people here are super good at what they do.
Yeah. And when they throw something off the gantry, they know exactly where it's going to go.
I would expect nothing less from NASA. Everything we do here, we're pushing the limits to understand how to safely crash,
but when we're studying it, safety is the number one priority.
Absolutely. The test is broadly going to do, and it's the details that we're studying.
Cool. So we don't want to hurt anyone. We don't want to break anything.
This is a unique national asset, a historic landmark.
So we want to make sure we don't break it.
Yeah. In the pursuit of breaking other things.
Yeah. Let us know in the comments below what you want us to drop here.
Okay. No 5090s will be harmed.
Unless you guys put it in the comments below. We're at the pool that we were just talking about, but can you tell me what these like
sigils are at the back? So those are photogrammetry registration points.
So when we point a bunch of cameras at the test article that we're flinging from the gantry
into the water, we know where the cameras are looking at in physical space relative to
what's seen on their image sensor. So each one is a slightly different pattern.
The software picks out where they are and does camera registration to know spatially
what the cameras are seeing. Okay.
How deep is this pool? I don't know.
It's definitely deeper than would be comfortable to swim in.
It's definitely dozens of feet deep.
Okay. But I don't know the exact number.
And then over there, you said that this is where current test articles are?
Some current and old test articles are built up in there.
Just so we have a little bit of shade for our technicians working in there.
It gets brutally hot out here. No kidding.
But it's a fun place to be.
I also see that gridded wall has numbers and markings on it. Same deal?
Same deal. Yep. Know where the cameras are.
So that's the old way to do it. You have a grid and you match the grid in pixel space to physical space.
The more modern computer vision any way to do it is with those targeting dots.
It's just different generations of the same technology.
I think that kind of represents this place. Yes.
Different generations of the same technology, whether that's like 50, 70 year old wind tunnels.
Yep. To the brand new vertical wind tunnel that you're putting up with the new.
All of the things we learn from the older facilities go into what we build.
We spend a lot of time and care in sorting our existing capabilities, our older wind tunnels,
upgrading them with newer measurement equipment, newer control equipment,
so that they continue to be useful in doing good science for decades to come.
I'm Gary Qualls. I've been here at NASA Langley since the mid-80s.
Oh wow. And it's a lot of really cool work here.
You guys are in the Lark Works Makerspace. This is a space where anybody on center, basically anybody here with a badge
can come in and try to do new things and learn new skills or build prototypes
or just collaborate with other people.
And in government parlance, you don't need a charge code.
You can just come in here and use this stuff. I think we all know prototyping tools have gotten a lot cheaper and a lot more accessible.
So it's possible to keep a place like this going on a pretty reasonable budget
and allow the researchers here to just get a lot of work done in a short period of time
and to do things at scale. I'm going to give you guys a quick tour.
We're very 3D printer heavy for a Makerspace.
We've got about 63D printers active right now.
That's a normal number for us. A lot of the printers that we have are these smaller kind of desktop models.
We print 95% PLA in here.
It's just very beginner friendly, very easy to get going.
We do have some of these bigger 3D printers.
This is a Gigabot, US made printer. These have a print volume that's 23.2 by 30 by 36 inches.
They have a decent demand in here for full scale parts for all kinds of different reasons.
We have more exotic printers over here.
What is something that you've printed on this? Do you have any examples?
Yeah, I can show you guys some examples in a couple of minutes.
We've got some full scale launch hardware. We've got full scale Mars rover wheels.
You could show folks that are great for outreach and really explaining the different kinds of jobs that NASA does.
This is a part for a wind tunnel to help seal something that's moving that's very complicated.
They all get a little bit more difficult to explain, but we do have some things that are easy.
The dudes at the lab are going to be so jealous.
Creator Warehouse is going to be so jealous of this, I'm sure.
In addition to the 3D printing that's available here, which is pretty generic.
We do have special purpose 3D printers. These can inlay continuous carbon fiber Kevlar fiberglass into the parts.
We have some larger printers over here that do multicolor and multi-material.
These cabinets down here are full of electronics.
So we have basically sensors here that people can use to build prototype machinery, mechatronic things.
So you could do soil moisture or relative humidity, light break sensors, accelerometers, gyros, all kinds of things like that.
Magnetic fields, right? We've got motors down here, servos, stepper motors, solenoids, magnetic grabbers to pick things up.
All kinds of microcontrollers, LEDs.
Things get more sophisticated as you go down the row here.
So we've got software to find radios, autopilots for drones, things to reverse engineer and troubleshoot, all kinds of different data networks.
So it's a pretty extensive space.
The whole idea is if somebody has an idea, they should be able to just come in here, start building it right away,
and not have to wait two weeks for procurement to order all the parts and get approvals.
And, you know, have something working the same day that you could show people or just test your idea to see if it's going to work.
And that's the whole plan. Everything in here is on wheels.
We can reconfigure the room to support different kinds of training.
Or sometimes I'll have a group that's just hosted here or a grad student in the corner for a few weeks doing work.
We have these electronics workstations. We've got a pretty decent oscilloscope, nice benchtop power supplies, soldering station,
really cool microscope where you can see in stereo.
That's kind of cool. We have some higher end stuff.
So we've got two of these universal robots.
You are 10 arms. We make these available to researchers to support different kinds of internal R&D projects or, you know, anything just to learn how to use robot arms, right?
So one of the things that, one of the themes we really stress here is this is a place where you can come and learn to do the things that you really only learn by doing.
Whether it's the electronics or 3D printing or using robot arms, you know, people can tell you how to do it or you can read about how to do it or you can watch how to do it on YouTube.
But until you really do it or try to do it and it doesn't work for like 45 minutes and you're like, I thought this is exactly how it's going to work.
But finally you do figure out, oh, it's wired this way or I have to do this and reset it and then I can load the code.
You know, whatever that process is, when you really do get it working, you really have learned something.
And then you can make those things work.
And the importance of that for NASA being able to do those complex things is, you know, those are the jobs we're called to do.
If you look back at this wall, these are vehicles that we can loan or give to different research teams.
We've got a whole bunch of different kinds of rovers. There's a little submarine up there.
We're very drone heavy because NASA Langley is an aeronautics research center.
But, you know, the people, you know, when you're putting a rover on Mars, right, you've got software, you've got all the wiring, you've got all the components.
And all of that has to work together. So you really have to know how to troubleshoot those things, how to integrate them and really how to design and architect them so that when something's failing,
you can localize where the failure is and troubleshoot it and solve the problem quickly instead of just starting to change things to see if it starts working again.
So those are the skills that we look for in people.
And again, those are the skills you develop by doing things.
And our young engineers need to have the experiences of doing those things so that they're ready when the big projects come along.
This area right here, we've got some of the other robots.
We've got these two-spot robots that were being used on this Fit to Fly project.
This is looking at automated aircraft maintenance and repair.
You can see some video here from when we partnered with Elroy Air, which is a big cargo drone company out in California.
And, you know, those cargo drones are big enough to carry their own robotic ground crews.
We've got other kinds of rovers that we're looking at, different collaborations with the Air Force.
This is an example of a drone that a graduate student came in and modified.
So he had to learn how to do CAD. He wanted to do curved arms for the drone instead of these normal straight arms.
And, you know, he had to learn how to do computer-aided design.
And he had to learn how to do 3D printing on the gigabots to print these big arms.
Probably went through 14 prototypes. Then he had to learn how to rewire everything.
Then he found out that the autopilots don't produce very good altitude estimates.
He needed to put on a LiDAR to get a really accurate altitude,
because this was flying over an array of microphones to measure how much sound it made.
So he got a LiDAR out of the drawer. He got an Arduino that a lot of your viewers will recognize.
A microSD card for the data. Bluetooth chip so you can see the data streaming on his phone.
And we said, well, you know, once the copter is armed, you can't approach it to make sure it's working.
And the last thing you want to do is have eight people out helping you on a flight test for an hour.
And then the data card's empty, right?
And then he designed a box, got him to write off and on it, right?
This is the definition of a rabbit hole, right? Yeah, but he was able to get this done in about four months, right?
Beginning to end, picked up all these skills.
He's working on his PhD in acoustics, so he knows a lot, but nothing about this, right?
So this is a place where he could come in and, you know, with a little bit of help, learn to do all those things himself.
You know, that's a nice demo story for kids.
You know, is that one thing I didn't learn until we really 3D printed these and assembled them.
Of course, we did it in plastic. The real ones are in metal.
Is that, you know, this hub is mounted here with these spokes, which have this really cool, curvy design.
These spokes are providing the whole suspension of the rover.
Everything is rigid, but when something needs to give a little bit going over a rock,
it's the flexing of these spokes. There aren't any shock absorbers or springs somewhere.
Because you wouldn't want to have air in your tires. Right.
Because the temperature variation. Yeah.
Yeah. That's... Yeah.
I mean, so... This is a Launch Abort 1 rocket.
So they had to test the Launch Abort rockets on the launch pad to the real launch.
And this area here would have been the top of the rocket.
And this is the mount point. These six points are where the actual space capsule would mount on top of the rocket.
So when you look through that little hole, you're looking at the top of this giant bracket.
That was machined out of an exotic aluminum alloy.
And there's an explosive bolt that would go in here that would help hold the space capsule on.
So the bottom heat shield of the space capsule is coming across like this and kind of curves up here.
There's an explosive bolt in there that holds it.
And a spring-loaded pin that can push the capsule away from the rocket if everything goes wrong and they're just drifting in space.
So the group that designed this was here at Langley.
And their computer analysis said that there's enough room in this hole for somebody to get their ARM in with a wrench.
And retract this pin and lock it out for launch.
And the computer said, plenty of room.
But they didn't want to have the whole launch schedule and everything depending on that analysis.
So they 3D printed this full-scale version of it so they could try it themselves.
And it got in there with a wrench and proved they could do it.
And then while they're doing it, they're like, hey, we could take pictures of us doing it and put it in the documentation.
Because the people doing that in the vehicle assembly building actually don't know what's down in that hole.
They've never seen any of this. And then they decided to reprint the parts in color so they could label them in the documentation.
Because they weren't Photoshop guys. They were designers, right?
They 3D printed them in different colors and made really nice documentation so the people on the launchpad know exactly what they're doing when they're reaching into these holes.
And everything could go like clockwork. So that's just another example of why full-scale 3D printing is found at a home in here.
And we'll try out a machine and then if it gets popular, that's when we start building out.
That's why we've got multiple of big machines, right?
Multiple resin machines. If you guys want to take a look in here where we keep things that need a little bit more training for people to use.
We've got a CO2 laser in the corner there.
The reason it's in here is if you put PVC plastic, a really common plastic in that laser, it's going to make mustard gas.
Very frowned upon in the workplace. So there's special training.
Don't put mystery plastics in the laser cutter. The main thing that happens in here are the resin printers.
These are a little less beginner friendly. They can print at higher resolution than the other 3D printers you guys saw.
We have over 13 different kinds of resin. So they can print things with all kinds of different material properties.
They could be stretchy or soft, super rigid.
Have a super nice surface finish or whatever they need.
High temperature, lost wax casting.
We had a project that was, you know, they're Plan A.
They were going to print these propeller blades in titanium.
I don't know if you guys have seen much 3D printed metal.
This is printed across the street in the next building. So these are a little heavy, right?
If that breaks out of the hub while it's spinning at 6,000 RPM,
it's going to go through like two Labs and find an interns rib cage, right?
So it's nobody wants. So they're like, hey, let's go to the makerspace.
See what, if we can print a propeller blade, that would work, right?
So this is the one they ended up with. That's printed in a really rigid resin.
And that's the surface finish out of the printer. And those worked fine at 6,000 RPM and carried all the loads.
That's the finish out of the printer. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.
After it's washed. After it's washed, right. But it hasn't been sanded or, yeah.
That's crazy. Yeah. So those are the kind of things people, you know, come in here.
There's a, you know, slide because we're NASA.
We have a lot of slides. But, you know, these two guys are pretty cool.
They're a couple of buildings over. They have their own wind tunnel.
They're in a micro tent building that we're just in.
Yeah. The building you guys came from. And they found out, you know, they can print models in this clear resin.
And not only can they measure the shock waves off of this really well,
but they can do the thermography to look at heating on the surface with this resin.
So now they can find out, oh, we've got tunnel time on Friday.
Come over here with a design, print it overnight,
and have it in the wind tunnel the next afternoon, ready to go.
So that's really opened up the kind of research things they can investigate.
And those are the, you know, we're just bringing people in more and more.
And, you know, it's, that's what we're here for is allow researchers to really come in here,
do things quickly, and get back to work.
We've got numerous stories where people were getting ready to deploy on a test out west somewhere.
They needed 132 adapters to attach these microphones to these plates out in the field.
And they're able to just colonize, you know, 20-some printers and just print all weekend
and have all the parts they needed to head out the door.
So. Awesome. Cool.
Yeah, thank you so much for the tour. That was, obviously, a flawless note.
Whoa. We made a couple of astronauts for you guys.
Thank you so much. So you can take those home. These are amazing.
Watch over you, I guess. Maybe cheer you on.
Thank you so much. No problem.
These are awesome. I love the little. I want you guys to leave here empty-handed.
I feel like, this is so cool.
Thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. NASA internships are open year-round.
All year. Yeah. You can sign up.
Paid internships? Let us know. Yeah, they have paid internships.
That's it. All right, see you later, Linus. I'm done.
I'm gone.