Johnsville: Where Astronauts Trained for Space
Near Trenton, Pennsylvania
The Navy took over this Bucks County site from the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation during World War Two and turned it into a center for testing weapons and experimental aircraft. But Johnsville's greatest chapter came later, when NASA chose it as a training ground for the astronauts of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.
The facility housed a massive human centrifuge, a gondola on a fifty-foot arm that could spin at forces up to forty times the pull of gravity. Many of the early American astronauts trained in that machine, building tolerance for the crushing acceleration of rocket launch and atmospheric reentry. John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, all of them came through Johnsville. The facility closed as a Navy installation in the nineteen nineties, but its contribution to the space program remains extraordinary.
