The fledgling National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, established by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915, had focused largely on military aviation. But the committee members realized that when World War I ended, there inevitably would be a push to develop new commercial opportunities for civilian air travel, and a new facility would be needed.
After considering more than a dozen other sites in seven states, the Army chose to build on 1,650 acres of land in southeast Virginia’s Elizabeth City County, then just north of the Hampton city limits. The NACA agreed that this was the right location from which to launch the partnership. The site was conveniently close to Washington, D.C., and to the shipyards in Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth, and the region’s climate and its location adjacent to the Back River and the Chesapeake Bay would allow for test flights over land and water in a wide variety of conditions.
In 1917, the new NACA facility — Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory at Langley Field — marked a major step into the modern age. Scientists and engineers moved to town, as well as technicians and pilots.
These were, by and large, young men with college degrees. Many of them were recent graduates, eager to put their education to work in a burgeoning field on the cutting edge of technology. They came from larger cities up north, very different from Hampton, Virginia. Some had military backgrounds.
They came with their families, and they enrolled their children in local schools.
By their very presence, these new neighbors brought with them a breadth of experience that would have an impact on anyone who lived in Hampton or on the surrounding Peninsula.
Construction took years, and the marshy conditions were difficult. Wolfe once described in a letter to his mother being “consumed by mosquitoes and bedbugs.” An influenza epidemic killed dozens of workers.
That damp, low-lying terrain slowed the pace of construction, and the U.S. entry into World War I also had a major impact. Deadlines became immediate, as the war effort needed the air field to be functional even as the rest of the facility was being built. The Army moved its experimental aviation efforts to McCook Field in Ohio, removing one of the primary functions that Scriven and Squier had imagined for Langley.
The School of Aerial Photography opened at Langley in 1917, training fledgling pilots to run reconnaissance missions. Post-war missions using the new dirigible technology, along with the arrival of the 2nd Bombardment Group, also provided vital work at the new facility. The proximity to the artillery units at Fort Monroe, off Hampton’s coast, also came in handy.
The NACA dedicated its lab in 1920. The ceremony included a flyover by a formation of 25 planes, one of which was piloted by legendary U.S. Army flyer Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell, who was later tasked with assembling and leading the 1st Provisional Air Brigade out of Langley.
The facility began with just one modest wind tunnel; by 1930, Langley was home to the world’s largest wind tunnel. It had a test section that stood 60 feet wide, and the facility delighted in showcasing its size by photographing engineers standing inside, dwarfed by the giant structure.
The work being done at Langley was transforming military and civilian aviation, with design breakthroughs that made flight safer, faster and more efficient.
Hampton native and NASA legend Christopher Kraft would begin his illustrious career in aeronautics with a job at Langley. But as an adolescent growing up in the shadows of Langley, he knew little about the groundbreaking work that was being done there.
“I don’t think the public association with NACA was a very prominent subject in that time period,” Kraft said. “I had no appreciation whatsoever of the impact that (Langley) was having on aviation. I didn’t know what their tasks were. There was a lack of publicity on the part of the government, but that wasn’t unusual. I don’t think they spent a lot of time on” trying to promote this work to the public.
The facility in Hampton would never garner a fraction of the public recognition afforded the later space centers in Houston and Florida. There are many good explanations for that disparity.
But in retrospect, Kraft came to believe that the facility in his hometown never received the attention merited by its accomplishments.
“I think they’ve suffered from a lack of understanding of their contribution to aviation in the U.S.,” Kraft said. “Every big, important thing that happened in aviation in that time period, up to World War II, was dependent upon the research done by NACA at Langley.”
A rocky birth
Just how far American aviation had fallen in the years following the Wright brothers’ landmark 1903 flight can be seen in an inventory of military flying machines made when World War I started in 1914.
France led the way with 1,400 aircraft, and the Germans had 1,000, write Donald D. Baals and William R. Corliss in the 1981 history “Wind Tunnels of NASA.”
Far behind the hundreds of planes in Great Britain and Russia came the U.S. with 23, and in 1913 it ranked 14th in the world in government funding for aviation.
Compared with the burgeoning research in Europe — which had constructed 20 wind tunnels in less than a decade — American universities were backwaters, too, with no aeronautics degree programs until after WWI started.
So little research and training was taking place in the U.S. compared with the government labs and universities in Europe, moreover, that the NACA cautiously decided to ease its inexperienced staff into the field by building a decade-old wind tunnel design already deemed outmoded.
Still, just six years after this unpromising start, Langley was posting such groundbreaking findings from its revolutionary second wind tunnel that it leapfrogged over everyone else, says senior curator Tom D. Crouch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Then it doubled down on what was then the world’s largest wind tunnel, where breakthrough tests in the 1920s decided the shape of the modern airplane.
“No place has played a larger role in the history of American flight technology than Langley Research Center,” Crouch says. “It’s hard to think of an airliner in the sky today that doesn’t have Langley’s signature on it. It’s hard to think of a military airplane flying today that Langley wasn’t involved with in some way or another.”
A newly hired young theoretician from the famed German aeronautics research center at the University of Göttingen already had applied his brilliant, if difficult, mind to the seemingly insoluble puzzle.
Soon Max Munk was overseeing the development of a visionary wind tunnel unlike any other on the planet.
By October 1922 the new facility started to generate test results seen around the world as a landmark breakthrough in aerodynamics.
“They’re getting results that no one else could get — and people all over the world are picking up on what they’re doing,” historian James Hansen says.
“The Variable Density Tunnel was a revolution in aerodynamic research — and it put Langley on the map. It helped create the Langley brand.”
But not until Munk suggested building a wind tunnel inside a sealed, airtight chamber and compressing the air did the NACA and its Langley lab move past the realm of theory — and the rest of the world — to construct a practical, pioneering solution.
“It was the arrival of Munk that turned Langley around,” Hansen says.
So new and few were Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory’s buildings in 1925, that — except for the growing strip of hangars, barracks and offices erected by the Army at neighboring Langley Field — the surrounding landscape still was largely centuries-old farmland.
But those links to the past began to fade as a huge steel-framed structure rose up over the summer.
By fall 1925, an immense double-circuit wind tunnel filled all 166 feet between the north and south walls — and soon it was powered by two massive 20-foot-long, 1,000-horsepower diesel submarine engines.
Equally colossal was the 28-foot-wide, eight-bladed fan that drew air through the test chamber at 100 mph when the switch was first thrown in June 1927.
That’s when the world’s first full-scale Propeller Research Tunnel took a once unpromising lab and — combined with the equally revolutionary, if smaller, Variable Density Tunnel — made Langley the center of aviation’s future.
World War II innovation
Where the 20-foot-wide Propeller Research Tunnel opened in 1927 as the only tunnel on the planet big enough to test full-size propellers, engines and parts of an aircraft fuselage, the Full-Scale Tunnel was a behemoth whose huge, 30-by-60-foot throat could hold complete airplanes with a 40-foot-wing span.
And when it was finished in 1931, its towering 97-foot height combined with its 434-foot length and 222-foot girth to make even the vaunted PRT look puny.
That’s exactly what George Lewis hoped for when he began pushing for a landmark that — at just more than $1 million — cost three times as much as everything else the lab had built during its first 12 years.
“Langley had a lot of success with the VDT and PRT. They put it on the map,” says retired FST chief Chambers, author of “Cave of the Winds: The Remarkable Story of the Full-Scale Wind Tunnel.”
“But what George Lewis wanted to build was a cathedral.”
Rocket testing at Wallops
At the end of World War II, the U.S. needed a facility to develop and test air-to-ground missile technology. A site was chosen on the Eastern Shore of Virginia — with access to the water, and conveniently close to the NACA Langley center and the U.S. Navy Auxiliary Air Station at Chincoteague.
The Wallops Flight Facility opened in 1945 and has been home to roughly 16,000 launches to hone aircraft design, to learn more about this planet and also to discover how to land safely on others. It has taken on many roles, especially after NASA purchased the air station in Chincoteague, which was closed by the Navy in 1959. The availability of full runways made it an ideal location to test the supersonic flights that could not be simulated in Langley’s wind tunnels.
“This was before the age of high-speed wind tunnels,” Wallops Deputy Director Bruce Underwood said. “So the way you collected data on a new aircraft shape was to put it on the front end of a rocket motor and fire the rocket.”
Women at Langley
During World War II and immediately after, another significant change began to emerge at Langley, as women began stepping into larger roles, and in larger numbers. But the roots of that trend went back much further, to women such as Pearl I. Young and Kitty O’Brien Joyner.
They were the among the women who first opened doors at the lab, in an era when females were widely assumed to have no interest and no aptitude for science and engineering.
Young’s legacy lives on at what is now NASA Langley, 95 years after she first set foot in Hampton.
Young, a physicist who graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1919 as a Phi Beta Kappa physics, chemistry and mathematics triple major, was coming to work at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory as its first woman professional.
Young paved the way for scores of other women to follow pursuits in science, technology, engineering and math fields at the NACA and later NASA. The Langley Lab, along with other federal sites, became a hub for women seeking employment they couldn’t obtain elsewhere because of limitations on where women should work — and later about what academic fields they should study.
Joyner, an electrical engineer from Charlottesville, became the lab’s first female engineer in 1939.
She began her career shortly after graduating from the University of Virginia. She sued the university for her right to attend the all-male engineering school.
Around the same time Joyner arrived, women were bringing their skills to the lab as “human computers.” The first cohort of the “computers who wore skirts,” as Katherine G. Johnson has often described herself and her colleagues, was hired in 1935.
The women, a group that began with five, computed by hand the math that engineers needed to conduct their research, which sped up the process.
The number of women — and employees — multiplied during World War II as the NACA’s contributions to the war effort increased and its literal manpower decreased. White and black women were both recruited by the lab to keep up with needs.
The sound barrier
The growing demand for pilot safety, military superiority and a more productive high-speed testing method had revived an idea engineer John Stack first conceived in 1942.
Meeting with the military, he sold them on the potential of a research airplane that could probe the “transonic region” straddling the speed of sound.
That led to the joint development of the Army Bell X-1 — the rocket-powered plane that broke the sound barrier — and the Navy Douglas D-558 — a jet that made extended research flights at transonic speeds.
Capt. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager was in the pilot’s seat when the second plane went up for trials on Oct. 14, 1947.
Despite being advised by the Langley men to stay below Mach .97 unless it was absolutely safe to go faster, Yeager accelerated not long after dropping from the B-29 at 10:26 a.m.
So seamlessly did he cross the supersonic threshold that — because of a broken rib sustained in a riding accident the previous day — he had more trouble climbing into the X-1’s cockpit than breaking Mach 1.
Langley established a new supersonics branch in response to German rocket innovation that helped lead to the Bell X-1 and the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.
Among the early leaders of Langley’s response was John V. Becker, assistant chief of the Compressibility Effects Division, who proposed building the nation’s first hypersonic wind tunnel even before the last report on the secret German lab was completed.
But after they added an electric heater, the 11-inch tunnel reached Mach 6.9 in November 1947.
The X-1, flown by Chuck Yaeger, eventually busted through the sound barrier and paved the way for the X-15.
“The X-15 was one of the most important and significant airplane designs of all time,” Hansen says.
“It laid the foundation for manned space flight.”
Everything changed in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched its satellite Sputnik, dramatically upping the ante in the emerging “space race” between the two global superpowers. Americans were stunned by the revelation of Russia’s new technology, and terrified by what it implied regarding America’s readiness for an escalating Cold War.
Suddenly there was a new focus inside the classrooms and labs at Langley. Engineers were studying orbital mechanics, density problems at high altitude and other subjects that Chris Kraft admits “were totally foreign to all of us at the time.”
It went even further over the heads of other Hampton residents, but for the first time they seemed to be fully aware that this mysterious agency — in 1958 renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — would play a vital role in the unfolding drama. And that their neighbors were on the crest of the wave of this new technology.
While the engineers and technicians never became local celebrities, seven men who arrived in 1959 certainly did — M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper, John H. Glenn, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter M. “Wally” Schirra, Alan B. Shepard and Donald “Deke” Slayton.
The Mercury 7.
America’s first astronauts began their training at Langley, and they lived with their families in ordinary homes out in the surrounding community. They ate in local restaurants and shopped in local stores. Unlike the “NACA nuts” of previous generations, they drew attention.
Shepard would eventually become the first American in space, and Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
A site in Houston was chosen as NASA’s new headquarters, but NASA Langley would be in the thick of plans for man to go to the moon.
Much of Langley’s top talent was transferred to Houston to launch the new space center. But it was the engineers and technicians in Hampton who designed the capsules that sent the Mercury astronauts into space.
As Project Apollo began, NASA entertained several options for a moon landing: 1. A direct ascent, 2. An Earth-orbit rendezvous and 3. A lunar-orbit rendezvous. The direct ascent option was dismissed because the projected launch vehicle would simply be too big, and the Earth-orbit was nixed because it required more than one launch to assemble the spacecraft in orbit.
The strategy for a lunar-orbit rendezvous was to launch a single rocket with two linked spacecraft — a command module and a lunar lander — that would fly to the moon and begin orbiting. Once there, the command module would keep circling while the lander would set down on the surface. Then, when ready, the lander would boost back up to rendezvous and dock with the mothership for the trip home.
But the lunar-orbit rendezvous option called for aerospace engineers to dream up new technologies, for astronauts to learn to link up two moving vehicles in space and for NASA to gain a better understanding of the moon’s surface to enable a safe landing for astronauts.
Thus began Project Gemini and the Lunar Orbiters mission.
In all, Hansen writes, Langley’s three major research groups that were devoted to Apollo worked on a total of 323 projects. Two other major groups at the center contributed to scores more.
Langley’s Space Mechanics Division was the most active, essentially focused on simulation research. Between Sputnik and Apollo, this division had developed nine new simulators. They included a rotating vehicle simulator to study the effects on astronauts of long stays in a rotating space station; a Lunar Orbit and Let-down Approach Simulator so pilots could experience the same sort of visual cues they would encounter while navigating and controlling a spacecraft in the vicinity of the moon; and a water immersion simulator to investigate problems associated with manned extra- and intra-vehicular activities in reduced gravity environments.
In 1965, Langley completed the $3.5 million Lunar Landing Research Facility, the brainchild of engineer Donald Hewes and his division chief, W. Hewitt Phillips.
Phillips, said Hansen, “was just a genius guy. His whole work had been on air couplings, but when the space age comes along, he starts thinking about his ideas and (applies them) to the problems being faced by Gemini and Apollo, and you get this really interesting research facility.”
The facility’s most obvious feature was its gantry — a six-legged, steel lattice, sawhorse-type behemoth, with two more legs angling out from one end. It rose 240 feet high, not including top warning lights and antennae, and stretched 400 feet long and 265 feet wide. Hewes and Phillips actually wanted a taller structure, but its height was restricted so it wouldn’t interfere with flights in and out of Langley Air Force Base next door.
On July 20, 1976, a hardy little spacecraft painted with a U.S. flag ripped through the thin Martian atmosphere.
A parachute and small rockets eased the Viking 1 lander onto an ancient flood plain called Chryse Planitia.
Then Viking 1 phoned home, signaling a safe landing on Mars.
Its goal was ambitious:
First, to make the first successful soft landing on Mars.
Then, to collect the first high-resolution images of its surface, learn what the planet and atmosphere were made of and — most intriguing of all — search for signs of life.
The choice was made for a number of reasons, but largely because NASA Langley and its academic and industry partners already had finessed the Lunar Orbiter project in 1966-67, placing five orbiters around the moon to map its surface for the Apollo program.
The Space Shuttle
Even before Armstrong first stepped onto the moon, NASA already was dreaming up a whole new concept for space flight intended to eclipse Apollo technology.
The Space Shuttle Program was conceived in 1968 out of the desire to have a reusable crew vehicle that would one day ferry crews and supplies from Earth to an orbiting space station, then return and glide to a landing on wheels on a runway.
“The shuttle was an airplane and it was a space plane and it was a satellite,” said William Woods, a retired NASA Langley aerospace engineer who worked for years on its development. “The shuttle was unique.”
“The primary purpose,” said another retired Langley aerospace engineer, George Ware, “was to have a reusable, less expensive system than just firing up a ballistic shape and throwing the parts away.
“It was very difficult to get a vehicle to fly and carry a payload the size of the shuttle. And the shape was not as aerodynamic as it was practical. And that’s the key — cheaper and quicker to develop.”
Improving air travel
Then in 2016 Langley was named to head a new X-plane initiative to develop envelope-pushing experimental aircraft, including a “low-boom” supersonic passenger jet. The center is working in partnership with Lockheed Martin, which was given $20 million to produce a preliminary design for what’s being called QueSST, or Quiet Supersonic Technology.
A sonic boom isn’t inconsequential. It’s created when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier and, as research aerospace engineer Kyle Ellis puts it, “makes a loud boom that nobody wants to hear.” In fact, it’s so earth-shaking that the FAA banned supersonic flight over national airspace years ago.
“What NASA’s doing now,” Ellis says, “is developing these new aircraft that are so sleek that it actually — the aircraft design, itself — mitigates the shockwaves.”
Langley designed and built the LITE instrument — the first to use a laser in space for atmospheric studies. LITE, or LIDAR In-Space Technology Experiment, flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1994 to measure cloud cover and track various particles in the atmosphere to study the global climate.
LIDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, shoots short pulses of laser light through the atmosphere to bounce or “echo” off atmospheric particles, including industrial pollutants, giving scientists an accurate reading of their distribution and makeup.
One follow-on to LITE was Langley’s CALIPSO environmental satellite, launched into orbit in 2006 in a joint effort with the French space agency CNES. CALIPSO stands for Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations.
Langley and Hollywood
Hampton native Margot Lee Shetterly pushed NASA Langley into a pop culture phenomenon with “Hidden Figures,” a best-selling book about the African-American women who worked as “human computers” at NASA Langley in the early days of the space program. That book was subsequently adapted into a 2016 film that earned three Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture.
That film, a feel-good hit that grossed more than $160 million at the U.S. box office, marked the first time many Americans had ever heard of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton. And the filmmakers went to great lengths for authenticity, asking the center’s current staff to send along volumes of archived photos so that everything from the work spaces to the parking lots would look just like NASA Langley at that time.
The film, set in the 1960s, concludes with a current photo of Katherine Johnson, one of the mathematicians at the center of the story. Johnson, then 98 years old, made an appearance on stage at the Academy Awards, receiving a standing ovation.
Bill Fredericks is on the forefront of what he thinks is the next great frontier of the aeronautics industry: drones. Fredericks led the design team at NASA Langley that developed Greased Lightning, a drone equipped with wings and rotors that combine the efficiency of an airplane and the hovering capability of a helicopter.
“It’s like having your cake and eating it, too,” he said.
But he didn’t want to set aside his work on Greased Lightning to take on the next NASA project — he wanted to see where Greased Lightning could go.
Fredericks sees huge potential for Greased Lightning and other drones.
“If I were to make a prediction of the future, I would suggest that five to 10 years from now, if you look out the window, you’re going to see a drone going by performing some work,” he said.
Next stop: Mars
It’s the year 2033, and four U.S. astronauts are buckled inside the world’s most advanced crew capsule atop the world’s most powerful rocket on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Their destination: Mars.
And the countdown is on.
Three ... two ... one ... and NASA’s colossal Space Launch System booster — even more powerful than the Saturn V Apollo moon rocket — gives a shuddering growl, blasts off from the pad and rips into the atmosphere.
About 100 miles up, the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle separates from the rocket and beelines for a rendezvous with a solar-powered deep-space port already assembled in orbit and stocked with crew provisions and science cargo.
The Orion docks with the spaceport, and the astronauts transfer to what will be their in-space habitat as they embark on a risky 1,000-day journey to become the first Earthlings ever to visit the Martian system.
The next 100 years
For Levine, Langley’s future lies in three key areas: climate studies, aeronautics and human exploration of the solar system.
“As time goes on, when we realize that global climate change was not made up by the Chinese and we reach certain points when the temperature’s increasing in the atmosphere at significant rates and everyone agrees it’s due to human activities, I think that Langley will play an important role in making measurements of global climate change,” Levine said.
“I also think that Langley will be making very important contributions over the next hundred years in the areas of aeronautics — particularly green aeronautics: how to design better and safer planes and burn less fuel.
“(And) as we expand humans into the solar system, to other planets and not only Mars but moons of Jupiter and moons of Saturn, I think that we’re going to have to develop new technologies to do a lot of these things. And I think Langley will be at the forefront.”
Going forward, both Crabill and Kraft urged Langley — and NASA in general — to return to earlier traditions of openness and strong leadership.
“I love the way they used to listen to people outside,” Crabill said. “Or even headquarters would solicit ideas from the research agencies, instead of telling them what to do.”
“I miss the fact that we are not as aggressive and as progressive as we ought to be,” said Kraft, adding that he saw it as a consequence of less money and more politics. “I think we need to be doing productive things in science and technology, because I think that the country benefited extremely well from the return on investment in the space program. And it will do that again, when the leadership takes over again. I hope that happens under President (Donald) Trump.”
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