It was a challenge to cram 100 years of history into just three days of discussion, but it was nothing NASA’s Langley Research Center couldn’t handle.
The Hampton, Virginia, center honored its rich legacy and looked forward to a bright future with a three-day NASA Langley Centennial Symposium July 12-14. Speakers from NASA, related government organizations, industry and academia populated the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton, Virginia, with stories and insights about NASA’s oldest — and first — research center. Even Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut and the second person to walk on the moon, made a surprise appearance.
From 11 initial employees, four buildings and a budget of $5,000 in 1917 to thousands of employees, state-of-the-art facilities and a multimillion dollar budget in 2017, NASA Langley has grown from its modest beginnings on a small patch of farmland as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
“When you hit your 100th birthday, it’s natural to glance over your shoulder and look at what you’ve done,” said NASA Langley Director David Bowles. “We can build a better tomorrow by learning from yesterday. At NASA Langley, we have such a rich history to explore.”
That history was discussed at length and in depth with numerous panels that opened windows on what was and what’s to come in the next 100 years.
“Everyone has been touched, by one way or another, by the ideas that have emerged from this historic laboratory in Virginia,” said NASA Acting Deputy Administrator Lesa Roe. “There’s a lot more stories out there and a lot more to be written, and I know Langley will be a part of that — as all of NASA will.”
“It’s the Langley culture that really set the basis for how NASA did a lot of its work.”
– Glenn Bugos, NASA’s Glenn Research Center historian
Looking back with pride
At one panel, “The History of Flight, A Century of Finding Practical Solutions,” professional historians explained why Langley’s influence has resonated so profoundly for 100 years.
Panelist Deborah Douglas — curator for science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum and who worked as visiting historian at Langley in the late 1990s — showed how the center’s creation in 1917 was part of a larger trend in industry toward creating labs that would be factories for invention. She said, “You would shift away from, in the aerospace context, what you’d call ‘fly and try’ to much more systematic and systemic styles of research.”
Eventually, NASA centers Ames, Glenn, Wallops, Armstrong and Johnson would all get started with staff transferred from Langley. As the researchers set up the new labs, they unpacked the values and techniques they learned at the agency’s first field center.
“There was a diaspora,” said session moderator Glenn Bugos. “It’s the Langley culture that really set the basis for how NASA did a lot of its work.”
Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, historian at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, introduced the audience to a long list of important figures who moved from Hampton to Houston in the early 1960s. The list included Bob Gilruth, Chris Kraft, Max Faget — the chief designer of the Mercury spacecraft who has been called the father of human spaceflight — and Dottie Lee, who started at Langley in 1948 as a human computer and who ended up as an engineer at Johnson. Lee is credited with designing the distinctive nose of the space shuttle, “which is affectionately known as ‘Dottie’s Nose,’” Ross-Nazzal said.
Members of the “NASA Langley Contributions to Space Technology and Space Exploration” panel reminisced about their days at Langley and the center’s contributions and a common theme resurfaced: the Langley-led Viking project.
Pictures taken by the Viking Orbiter and Lander made the Martian surface come to life by offering answers to unknown questions about the red planet.
“The first things that I remember as a boy were the Viking landings on Mars,” said Robert Braun, dean of engineering and applied science at the University of Colorado. “It’s what inspired me in my pre-teen years and when I was a teenager.” Braun eventually landed a job at Langley, where he helped put the first rover – Sojourner – on Mars in 1997.
The unforgettable Viking project led to scientific discoveries and technologies that benefit humanity today.
Langley’s Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, a direct result of Viking, is an entry descent and landing technology could allow NASA to send more scientific instruments to distant worlds, enhancing and enabling robotic and scientific missions to destinations with atmospheres such as Mars.
Today’s successes
A panel on Earth science observations focused on the ways in which Langley’s research has benefited society — including national security. David Young, director of Langley’s Science Directorate, said the center’s Earth science research has an “immediate impact” because it focuses on the only planet humans live on.
One of the panelists was retired Navy Rear Adm. Jonathan White, now president and CEO of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, a nonprofit organization that represents leading ocean science and technology institutions. His Navy career included appointments as the director of the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change and Navy deputy to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
White cited a claim by Adm. James Watkins, who served as Secretary of Energy during the George H.W. Bush administration, that the U.S. won the Cold War because its superior knowledge of oceanography gave its submarine fleet the upper hand over the Soviet fleet.
“We only had that because of the space science — the satellites, the Earth science from space,” said White. “A lot of that technology, a lot of that science started here.”
Panelists also discussed how Langley science can tell us more about big, damaging storms. Just this past June, during NASA’s airborne Convective Processes Experiment (CPEX), a Langley technology called Doppler Aerosol Wind (DAWN) lidar used laser pulses to measure wind profiles in Tropical Storm Cindy, which affected the Gulf Coast. DAWN was the first airborne wind lidar to take measurements of a tropical cyclone pre-storm, during storm formation, all the way through to landfall.
Bruce Wielicki, a senior scientist at Langley, called attention the threat posed by sea level rise right here in Hampton Roads over the next 100 years. “Will Langley still be in Hampton?” he asked.
One way to help answer that question, he argued, would be to invest in an improved climate-observing system that would make measurements at a much higher accuracy and much longer timescale than most current instruments allow. Whether Langley is still dry and free of rising seas in low-lying Hampton 100 years from now or not, Wielicki envisions the center’s scientists playing an enormous role in understanding how Earth’s climate will continue to change.
“Learning about our world and giving ourselves a clearer view to that future is where I see Langley’s contribution to next 100 years of Earth science is likely to go,” he said.
Tomorrow’s promises
The symposium’s final day gazed at how planning in the present can shape how the future will be formed. Looking forward to 100 years, you can let your imagination run wild. However, looking 20-30 years ahead, NASA has to work within constraints and challenges.
“When you predict the future, you don’t have the benefit of hindsight,” said Sandra Magnus, former astronaut and executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She was the moderator of the “Future of Aerospace in the Next 20-30 Years” panel.
The 20-30 year time frame “is the sausage-making phase” as the creativity is much more complex because you have to work with existing constraints, she said. “It’s really challenging.”
The challenges are being faced right now, with the emergence of autonomy, new fuel propulsion mechanisms and unmanned aerial systems being at the forefront.
“All of this is converging … to really form a revolution,” said NASA Langley aerospace engineer Jesse Quinlan at the “NASA Langley Early Career Panel Discussion” panel.
Many panelists concurred that NASA’s future will be determined now, making even the things that might seem innocuous and mundane at first glance matter in the long run.
“It’s sometimes easy to forget that you’re shaping the future,” Magnus said. “Everything you’re doing every day, every decision that you’re making, every meeting that you’re sitting in … you are making a difference and you are creating that 100-year vision.”
Any vision NASA Langley can create cannot come to fruition without the people at work at the center, and at the end of the symposium that fact was cemented as to make the sure the next generation is ready.
“Someone’s going to stand on our shoulders someday,” said NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot.
NASA, he said, has to change the way it looks at human exploration, air travel, space missions and science collection – with NASA Langley helping lead the charge.
“It’s pretty awesome to think about what’s going to happen in the next 100 years moving forward,” said Lightfoot. “I think great things are ahead. We’ve only just begun this journey.”
- To view on-demand streams of all three days of the Centennial Symposium, click here.
- To view a photo gallery of the event, click here.