NASA Ames and the Blunt Body: How California Engineers Kept Astronauts Alive

The enormous structure you may be able to see from the highway near Mountain View is Hangar One at Moffett Field. It was built in nineteen thirty-three to house the USS Macon, a Navy airship that served as a flying aircraft carrier. The Macon was lost at sea two years after the hangar was completed. The hangar has been used for everything since and remains one of the largest freestanding structures in North America.

The facility adjacent to it is NASA Ames Research Center, founded in nineteen thirty-nine as the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory under NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor to NASA. By nineteen forty-four, the facility had completed the world's largest full-scale wind tunnel, capable of testing full-size aircraft. The California History journal and the California State Library document the facility's research history and its role in the American aerospace program.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, Ames researchers developed what became known as the blunt-body reentry concept. The problem they were solving was straightforward: how do you bring a spacecraft back through the atmosphere without burning it up? The intuitive answer, a sharp pointed nose to pierce the air, was wrong. The correct answer, a rounded blunt heat shield that deflects the shock wave forward and insulates the capsule behind it, was developed through theoretical and experimental work at this facility.

The design principle derived from that research is still used in every spacecraft that returns from orbit. The astronauts who came back from the International Space Station, from the moon, are alive because of work done in a building you can see from this road, by researchers whose names are mostly unknown outside of aerospace engineering.

The blunt body. A counterintuitive answer to a lethal problem. California engineers, in a valley that would become famous for a completely different kind of technology.