Enduring Heritage

The Virginia Air and Space Center is home to the
Great Aerodrome, which almost beat the Wrights into the air.

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By Donald L. Lansing

Visitors can travel through the universe with the astronauts, soar through the sky in historic aircraft, or step back 400 years to when the first explorers came to the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area. All that and more is on tap at the Virginia Air and Space Center and Hampton Roads History Center, the official visitor headquarters for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center. Located in Hampton’s downtown waterfront area, the facility holds more than 100 historical, aeronautic and space exhibits, including the Apollo 12 command module, the Mercury 14 capsule, Samuel P. Langley’s Great Aerodrome and numerous other air and space craft that seem to float from the soaring 94-foot-high ceiling. Since opening its doors to the public on April 5, 1992, the center has educated and entertained more than 50,000 visitors from around the world, won numerous awards and been featured in national magazines. Based on the theme “From the Sea to the Stars,” the $30 million facility houses collections from Hampton Roads and NASA Langley’s diverse projects. Visitors are able to see, touch, read and hear about the role the Hampton Roads area has played in shipbuilding, aerospace research, aviation and space exploration.

The Virginia Air and Space Center’s aviation history begins with the story of Samuel Langley’s Great Aerodrome. The exhibit, which depicts the origins of aeronautics in the United States, is on loan from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Langley is the namesake of both the nearby NASA Langley Research Center and Langley Air Force Base, headquarters of the Air Combat Command. And, as Langley conducted his flight tests on the Potomac River, north of Hampton Roads, the exhibit holds special significance in local aviation history.

The Great Aerodrome is suspended so that the details of its unique construction are readily visible. This artifact is accompanied by a statue of Langley and a short audio-visual program that presents some background on his career and accomplishments. The Aerodrome was Langley’s attempt to build the world’s first heavier-than-air, man-carrying, powered flying machine. Langley’s machine was in contention with the Wright brothers’ Flyer to be the world’s first operational airplane. Unfortunately, the project was to bring Langley only bitter disappointment and public ridicule.

Langley’s interest in aviation blossomed when he was 52, just before he joined the Smithsonian Institution as its new secretary. By then, Langley had an established international reputation as a solar physicist. He had invented an instrument, the bolometer, for measuring the spectral distribution of the sun’s radiant energy. He studied the then-unexplored infrared portion of the sun’s radiation and made the first attempt to estimate the solar constant–the rate at which the earth receives energy from the sun–a critical determinant of our climate and growing seasons. For that pioneering work, Langley received numerous medals, awards and honorary doctorates from scientific societies and universities in the United States and abroad.

In 1891, Langley began to build large, steam-powered, unmanned models of heavier-than-air flying machines, which he called “aerodromes.” Seven aerodromes subsequently were constructed, numbered 0 to 6. Each was different, but typically weighed 20 pounds, was 16 feet long and had a 12-foot wingspan. They had a unique tandem-wing configuration with four wings of identical shape, two forward and two aft. Two pusher propellers were each powered by a small 1-horsepower, alcohol-fueled steam engine. The aerodromes, which were completely uncontrolled in flight, were launched with a spring-loaded catapult from the top of a houseboat anchored in the Potomac River near Quantico, Va. The river offered an unobstructed flyover area and a large landing area.

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