Creeva’s World 2.0

So yes­ter­day 06/01/08  Xie ‘lan­thia, Ghoul­ishcharm, and myself made it out to NASA’s Plumbrook Sta­tion facility.

Wikipedia has this infor­ma­tion on Plumbrook:

The 6400-acre Plum Brook field sta­tion near San­dusky, Ohio is also part of Glenn. It spe­cial­izes in very large-scale tests which would be haz­ardous within the con­fines of the main cam­pus. The Space­craft Propul­sion Facil­ity at Plum Brook Sta­tion (PBS) is the world’s only facil­ity capa­ble of test­ing full-scale upper-stage launch vehi­cles and rocket engines under sim­u­lated high-altitude con­di­tions. The PBS Space Power Facil­ity houses the world’s largest space envi­ron­ment sim­u­la­tion cham­ber. PBS also has cryo­genic test facil­i­ties and a hyper­sonic wind tunnel.

We got a late start (my fault) and arrived right around 5 PM.   The park­ing was sup­posed to be on the right hand side of RT 250, but in the first go around we didn’t see it.  So we looped around and headed for the main gate fol­low­ing the avail­able signs.  Like when we went to the Glenn Research Open House, they weren’t allow­ing peo­ple in the main gate, but we weren’t the only ones that were lost (there was a pickup truck in front of us that seemed to be on the same mis­sion).  The secu­rity guard gave direc­tions to the pickup, a police offi­cer gave direc­tions to us.   It seemed we had 8 min­utes before the final tour left for the day (and this being the last day we were SOL if we didn’t make it).  We went back to RT 250 and con­tin­ued down fur­ther then I turned around the first time, it was about a 1/2 mile fur­ther down the road.

The park­ing lot was an old field, we were in miata (yes I know three peo­ple in a miata (don’t ask)) and some of the ruts were quite deep, so I bot­tomed out the car a cou­ple times.   Now you would think that a facil­ity that they had sunk bil­lions (yes bil­lions with a B) would have at least had a gravel park­ing area.   We later found out we could have parked at the indoor water park down the road and taken a bus from there, how­ever there was no indi­ca­tors that this could have been accomplished.

We made it through secu­rity, in which they checked my cam­era bag and asked if we were US cit­i­zens, after that we made it onto the last bus of the day over to the infor­ma­tion cen­ter.  On the way we were given a his­tory les­son on the Plumbrook prop­erty, which was a TNT man­u­fac­tur­ing plant way back when.  Here is Nasa’s his­tory of Plumbrook:

NASA’s only nuclear test reac­tor was the Plum Brook Reac­tor Facil­ity, which is affil­i­ated with the NASA Glenn Research Cen­ter . The facil­ity, located on land that is now Plum Brook Sta­tion in San­dusky, Ohio, oper­ated from 1962–1973; but the his­tory of the land stretches back to the 19 th Cen­tury when War of 1812 vet­er­ans were given the prop­erty. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment seized 9000 acres of this farm­land in 1941 to con­struct a sprawl­ing Ord­nance Works facil­ity that oper­ated through­out World War II.

The National Advi­sory Com­mit­tee for Aero­nau­tics pur­chased the land in 1956 to build a test reac­tor, to sup­port atomic air­craft stud­ies being con­ducted by the Atomic Energy Com­mis­sion. Although that con­cept was shelved before con­struc­tion of the reac­tor was com­pleted, Pres­i­dent Kennedy breathed new life into the facil­ity by sup­port­ing a national nuclear rocket pro­gram in May 1961, a month before the Plum Brook reac­tor was started up (also known as “taken crit­i­cal”) for the first time.

Dur­ing its oper­a­tions, the 60-megawatt Plum Brook Reac­tor con­ducted over 70 exper­i­ments, most of which stud­ied the effects of radi­a­tion on var­i­ous mate­ri­als. After the mate­ri­als were irra­di­ated in the reac­tor, they were trans­ferred to the Hot Lab­o­ra­tory where they could be remotely exam­ined, using manip­u­la­tor arms that reached into a series of seven test cells.

The nation’s nuclear rocket pro­gram was can­celled dur­ing the post-Apollo bud­get cuts. The reac­tor was closed down in 1973 and was placed into a “safe dry stor­age” mode, dur­ing which it was mon­i­tored by NASA until ini­tial decom­mis­sion­ing work began in 1998.

Since it was so late in the day the only build­ing we could get into was the Space Power Facil­ity, Wikipedia as this infor­ma­tion on the Space Power Facil­ity:

The Space Power Facil­ity (SPF) is a vac­uum cham­ber built by NASA in 1969. It stands 122 feet high and 100 feet in diam­e­ter, enclos­ing a bullet-shaped space. It is the world’s largest ther­mal vac­uum cham­ber. It was orig­i­nally com­mis­sioned for nuclear-electric power stud­ies under vac­uum con­di­tions, but was later decom­mis­sioned. Recently, it was recom­mis­sioned for use in test­ing space­craft propul­sion sys­tems. Recent uses include test­ing the airbag land­ing sys­tems for the Mars Pathfinder and the Mars Explo­ration Rovers, Spirit and Oppor­tu­nity, under sim­u­lated Mars atmos­pheric conditions.

The SPF is located at Plum Brook Sta­tion, near San­dusky, Ohio. Plum Brook Sta­tion is part of the Glenn Research Cen­ter in Cleve­land, Ohio.

We got to walk through the build­ing and through the vac­uum cham­ber itself.  You can look at the pho­tos in my Flickr set.

All in all it was an enjaoy­able and worth­while trip, though I don’t think I would bother a sec­ond time.

Click hear to read more about exper­i­ments and infor­ma­tion at Plumbrook.