NASA Open House 2014

Well the NASA Open House was fun; it was promising to be crowded but Moffett Field had enough space that one did not noticed the 120K people.  For the first open house since the 80's?, people where very excited and the 120K sold out in 3 days.  So when a friend of ours told us about the tickets, they where already gone.  But never fear NASA always has a way and they where giving out a very limited quantity of back-stage tickets to tour several of the facilities, thus I tried for them and was luck enough to get a pair.  Thus my daughter and I got tickets, (they limited it to 2).  I told Qun and she told another friend and they ended up gathering a few tickets and Qun was able to go also.

So here talks about the Open House and when they said expect traffic delays, they where not kidding.  It took other friends of ours about 2 to 3 hours to get to the exit in NASA (about 1 mile on Hwy 280) and other friends about 2 hours to get to public transportation then to NASA.  (Us, well I being paranoid about the traffic, I forced everyone to leave early and we ended up getting to NASA about 1/2 hour before the gates open, there was already a few thousand people.)

Anyway, our back stage pass was the Full scale wind tunnel in which they where modeling the wind tunnel itself.  Actually they where testing the proposed Google complex that is planned to be built near by and wanted to see how the buildings would affect the air pattern.  Interesting thinking about how much air the intake must require.  The first picture shows the wind tunnel and the building complex was on the other side of the walkway pictured.

Other interior (the fans that pull the air in) and exterior (air input) shots of the facility.

And it would not be NASA without a few robots.  The last guy would collect the ball from where ever it was thrown and pick it up and throw it back to the tender in the back corner of the arena.

These models where cool.  They where special titanium alloys because they where so thin and needed to withstand the heat generated from the supersonic wind tunnel.

Here are test sections cut out of the honey comb heat shield planned for Orion.

And a futuristic sky car concept that they are hoping to build in Israel.  It seems that Israel can cut through the red tape better than the US.

And last leaving.  Was planning on spending 3 or 4 hours but ended up leaving about 4:30.