Zero Gravity Research Facility

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A few photos from the Zero Gravity Research Facility at NASA's Glenn Research Center, next to the Cleveland airport. I was there during the NASA tweetup I went to back in March. The name sounds exotic, but the concept is actually pretty simple: There's a 510 foot hole in the ground, lined with steel and sealed, with vacuum pumps to remove all the air. Experiments are enclosed in protective vehicles and dropped from the top of the shaft. The drop vehicle experiences 5.18 seconds of free fall (the zero gravity part) before landing in a pit of foam beads at the bottom.

A datasheet about the facility lists various things it can be used for, like testing new hardware, prototyping experiments that might go to space later, and so on. As it was explained to us, in recent years the facility's been used primarily for testing things you may not want to try on board a space shuttle or space station, like studying how fire behaves in zero gravity. I get the impression this research doesn't fully utilize the facility, and the datasheet mentions possible commercial uses, which I think means it's rentable if you have money and a legitimate use for the facility. If you fit that description, you'll probably want to start by reading the detailed User's Guide (the version online dates to 1999 so the bits about instruments and data handling are probably obsolete, but it still gives a general idea about how the process works.)

The guide mentions that they have a variety of still and video recording options, including high speed video cameras, but none of this video seems to have made it to YouTube, unfortunately. GRC does have its own YouTube channel, although it isn't updated regularly, and they don't seem to have any videos from here or the other unusual & heavy-duty facilities they run. At least not so far.

We were a bit pressed for time and only got to see the facility from the top, which was kind of a shame. The Wikipedia page about the facility includes a photo looking up from the bottom, with a drop vehicle about to hit the foam beads, and another photo on archive.org shows a vehicle as it enters the bead pit. A Cleveland Magazine article visited the bottom of the pit, and the author seemed to be somewhat freaked out about being in such a deep hole.