Glenn Research Center

• 1. Introduction

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  Glenn Research Center sits on a stretch of land in northeastern Ohio, wedged between Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and the Rocky River Reservation of Cleveland Metroparks. It is a place where the sky and space have been the subject of serious scientific inquiry since 1942, when a handful of engineers first gathered under the banner of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to study how aircraft engines burn fuel. From that narrow beginning grew one of the ten major NASA facilities in the United States, a center whose fingerprints can be found on the Apollo Moon landings, the International Space Station, and the commercial jets flying overhead right now.

  Today the center employs about 1,650 civil servants and roughly 1,850 support contractors. Its director is Dawn Schaible. But the institution's real story is not in its current headcount. It is in the succession of names it has carried over the decades, each one marking a shift in ambition, and in the extraordinary list of technologies it sent out into the world.

• 2. A Name That Keeps Changing

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  Funding for the installation was approved in June 1940, and the center opened two years later under the name Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory. That first name said everything about the job at hand: burn fuel, push air, make engines better. By 1947 the name had changed to the Flight Propulsion Research Laboratory, and a year after that it became the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, honoring George W. Lewis, who had led NACA from 1919 to 1947.

  The switch to NASA in 1958 brought another renaming, this time to NASA Lewis Research Center. The final and current name came on the 1st of March 1999, when the facility was officially redesignated the NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field. The honor went to John Glenn, who was a fighter pilot, the first American to orbit the Earth, and later a politician. Lewis Field itself remains embedded in the title as a quiet reminder of the institution's older identity.

  Through all these renamings, the first director, Edward R. Sharp, presided from May 1942 until 1960, spanning the transition from NACA to NASA. Fifteen directors have followed him, with the current occupant taking over on the 7th of November 2022.

• 3. Technologies That Reached Space

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  As early as 1951, researchers at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory were studying combustion in liquid rocket engines. That early curiosity led to something decisive. The center is credited with developing the liquid hydrogen rocket engine, which Wernher von Braun called the critical technology that made the Apollo Moon landings possible.

  The Centaur upper-stage rocket also traces its origins here. So does the gridded ion thruster, a high-efficiency engine designed for long-duration spaceflight. A Glenn-derived ion engine flew aboard the NASA probe Deep Space 1. The Electrical Power System for Space Station Freedom was developed at Glenn as well; a slightly modified version of that system now runs on the International Space Station.

  More recently, the center took on management of the service module for the Crew Exploration Vehicle, an announcement made on the 13th of May 2006. That contract promised to bring billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs to the center, and it signaled a deliberate pivot from aeronautical research toward space exploration.

• 4. The Work on Wings and Engines

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  Not all of the center's output has gone into orbit. Glenn does sustained research into jet engines, aiming to cut fuel use, reduce pollution, and lower noise. The chevrons the center developed for noise reduction now appear on many commercial jet engines, including those used on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

  The center's core competencies span a range that connects the atmosphere and deep space: air-breathing propulsion, communications technology, space propulsion and cryogenic fluids management, power and energy storage, and materials suited to extreme environments. The Icing Research Tunnel captures this dual mandate neatly. It is a wind tunnel that simulates atmospheric icing conditions, letting engineers test how ice builds up on aircraft wings and bodies and evaluate anti-icing systems before those systems ever fly.

• 5. Falling Underground

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  One of the stranger structures on any NASA campus sits almost entirely below ground in northern Ohio. The Zero Gravity Research Facility is a vertical vacuum chamber built around a concrete-lined shaft 28 feet in diameter that extends 510 feet below ground level. Inside the concrete shaft sits an aluminum vacuum chamber 20 feet in diameter and 470 feet high. Before use, the pressure inside is reduced to 13.3 newtons per square meter.

  The point of all this is to simulate weightlessness by dropping experiment payloads in free fall, allowing researchers to observe how fluids, gases, and combustion behave without gravity. The facility was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985. It has held the title of the world's largest microgravity facility since 2003, when the Japan Microgravity Centre closed. For students, the facility also runs the Dropping in a Microgravity Environment program, known as DIME, and the What if No Gravity program, WING. Each year, high school teams write proposals for experiments, and the winning teams travel to the center to run their experiments and submit a research report to NASA.

• 6. Plum Brook and Armstrong

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  About 50 miles from the main campus, in southern Erie County near Sandusky, a separate facility handles the tests that would be too hazardous to run in Brook Park. Originally called Plum Brook Station, this site covers 6,400 acres and specializes in very large-scale testing.

  The station is home to five major facilities: the Space Environments Complex, the In-Space Propulsion Facility, the Combined Effects Chamber, the Hypersonic Tunnel Facility, and the NASA Electric Aircraft Testbed. The B-2 Spacecraft Propulsion Research Facility there is described as the world's only facility capable of testing full-scale, upper-stage launch vehicles and rocket engines under simulated high-altitude conditions. The Space Power Facility houses the world's largest space environment vacuum chamber.

  In 2019, Ohio senators Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown proposed naming the station after Neil Armstrong. The legislation became law on the 30th of December 2020, and the site was officially renamed the Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility. Before that renaming, a significant decommissioning project had already reshaped the site: the Plum Brook Reactor was decontaminated and decommissioned under a 2008 cost-plus-fee contract valued at more than 33.5 million dollars.

• 7. Visitors, Students, and Public Life

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  For decades, Glenn operated its own Visitors Center on-site. In September 2009 it closed, and the displays were sent to the Great Lakes Science Center in the North Coast Harbor area of downtown Cleveland. The move was partly about budget and partly about reach. The former on-site location drew around 60,000 visitors per year. The new Glenn section at the Great Lakes Science Center drew 330,000 in its first year alone.

  The center also runs the Lewis' Educational and Research Collaborative Internship Program, known as LERCIP. High school sophomores and juniors from the Cleveland area can apply for an eight-week program focused on science, technology, engineering, math, or professional administration. College students from anywhere in the country are eligible for a 10-week internship open to all levels. Teachers in STEM fields can apply for a separate 10-week program. All interns work 40 hours a week alongside NASA mentors. Public tours of the research facilities run on the first Saturday of each month, with advance reservations required.