How Can Wind Tunnels Help Spacecraft?
NASA also uses wind tunnels to test spacecraft and rockets. Even though these vehicles are designed to operate in space where there is no atmosphere, they must travel through the atmosphere to get there. Vehicles that carry humans into space also must come back through the atmosphere during re-entry. Wind tunnels are playing an important part in the development of the new Ares rockets and Orion spacecraft. NASA engineers tested ideas for the design of Ares in wind tunnels to see how well they would fly. Engineers tested Orion models to learn more about how different designs would behave when coming back through the atmosphere.
