re: Pictures from days gone by....

Another quick NASA installment...

Plum Brook Station is a NASA location that is tied to Glenn Research Center, much the way that Michoud is tied to Marshall, That Wallops Island is tied to Goddard, and White Sands to Johnson. Plum Brook is maybe most well known as being the location of NASA test nuclear reactor. It was the location of a former armory and ammunition depot in Sandusky Ohio - if you exit off I-90 headed north to the city center on Milan Rd, you can see what looks like a nuclear containment dome off to the left.

However, the NASA nuclear reactor is long gone - it was decommissioned in the early 70's and the building isn't even there any more. It was actually a tiny reactor, only 50-60 megawatts or so and was originally designed for research towards a nuclear plane NASA was thinking about designing. Ultimately, there were too many problems to overcome and the project was scrapped.

The dome you see though, is actually a vacuum/pressure chamber that is a half dome, appx 120' in diameter and just about as tall. Think about a teacup that is laid upside down, with dual pass through doors on opposite sides on the walls that have some verticality. They use cryogenic pumps to obtain a vacuum of 10 ^ (-7th) torr, which is equivalent of a hard space vacuum - it takes nearly three days to get that much vacuum in place for testing. The chamber is large enough that they can simulate structures in space and also perform Mars bounce tests.

Since it was designed for both vacuum and nuclear testing, the walls of this chamber are 3" thick aluminum (which is pretty transparent for nuclear purposes). The walls of this dome are reinforced with "tee ribs" every few feet for strength. They told me that when the dome was built in 1968, they had to stockpile aluminum for years since they used the equivalent of 80% of the USA aluminum smelting output to build it. You can see the outside wall of the aluminum dome here, with the reinforcing ribs shown on the left:



AS IF THAT WERE NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH... the dual pass through doors are appx 50 wide x 50' tall. The edges of the doors are tapered so that in place when a vacuum is being pulled, they wedge in tighter to seal up with their seals. These doors are made of the same 3" thick aluminum, backed with over 8' of steel reinforced concrete. In this pic, you can see the opposite side door.



When a full vacuum is in place as noted above, these 50' square doors flex in more than 8" in the middle of the door. Again, 8' thick aluminum and steel. That's incredible to me, it's amazing that a panel that thick could bend in that much from atmospheric pressure alone against a vacuum on the other side.

If you want a vertical view of Plum Brook, go here:

LINK

The rows you see near the vacuum chamber building are the old roads between the ammo storage bunkers from WWII. Redstone Arsenal has plenty of those also.

That’s my grandmother seated opposite of the lady in red.

I had a similar one. I never could figure out what he had in his hand. It was too big compared to the other jets. Of course in reality, he was MUCH smaller in the actual movie.

quote:

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That’s my grandmother seated opposite of the lady in red.

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You serious, Clark? If so, that's awesome.

"Head 'em up... Move 'em out!"

Man reading a book with sika deer, Nara Park, Japan - 1960s