NASA Opens New Flight Dynamics Research Facility in Virginia

NASA opened the Flight Dynamics Research Facility on Friday at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia—the agency's first major new wind tunnel in over 40 years. According to NASA, the twenty-five thousand square foot facility consolidates capabilities from two older tunnels and features a twenty-foot test chamber with a top speed of one hundred seventeen miles per hour, nearly double its predecessors, enabling testing of commercial aircraft, drones, spacecraft, and experimental X-planes. The wind tunnel will be critical to NASA's Artemis lunar program and future Mars missions, where it will help validate vehicle designs for safe entry, descent, and landing on other worlds.

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