BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Now that John Glenn has returned from space, he' s likely to be showered with honors - including a large NASA research center in Cleveland that soon will bear his name.
In a budget bill passed last month, Congress approved a proposal from Sen. Mike DeWine to rename the NASA Lewis Research Center as the NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field. A date for the name change has not been set.
The research center is just one of the many connections Ohio has to the space program.
NASA also works regularly with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton and sponsors aerospace research at the University of Cincinnati. The state that calls itself the Birthplace of Aviation (because the Wright brothers lived in Dayton) also happens to be the nation' s leading birthplace for astronauts.
The NASA Lewis Research Center has an annual budget exceeding $671 million and employs 2,100 civil service staff and 1,500 contractors. The center was founded as a jet propulsion research facility in 1941 by what was then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It was named after George W. Lewis, NACA research director from 1924 to 1947.
Today, the soon-to-be Glenn Center serves as NASA' s lead center for research in aeropropulsion, aerospace power systems and satellite communications. It also remains involved in Earth-based aviation work.
Its current projects include developing the power system and the fluids and combustion facility for the new International Space Station.
The Lewis Center tested the airbag landing system for the Mars Pathfinder mission. It also is working on engine designs for NASA' s High-Speed Civil Transport project.
In 1996, Evendale' s GE Aircraft Engines won a five-year, $62 million contract from the Lewis Center to develop technologies for lower nitrogen oxide emissions, lower noise levels and improved fuel efficiency of its future commercial jet engines.
NASA also spends about $1.5 million a year for research at the University of Cincinnati' s department of aerospace engineering. Among UC' s past space projects: studying cooling systems for the Apollo launch pad in the 1960s, becoming a NASA center for computational fluid dynamics in 1981, and studying propulsion systems in the late 1980s.
Its current projects include aerospace, electrical and mechanical engineering departments, as well as geography and geology projects. Among the largest: a three-year $421,000 grant for monitoring space propulsion systems; two grants worth $386,000 to work on images from the Landsat satellite; and a four-year $339,000 grant to train graduate engineering students.
In 1992, UC won a five-year $7 million grant to continue its Space Engineering Research Center. In 1994, UC engineers helped test the SAFER jetpack used by shuttle astronauts to spacewalk without a tether.
In May 1996, the shuttle Endeavour carried an experiment designed by UC graduate engineering student Jihad Albayyari that looked for ways to reduce the risk of fuel tanks exploding during space flight.
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