Photos: A whirlwind tour of wind tunnels

Last week, we brought you a photo gallery on the Langley Full Scale Tunnel, a historic wind tunnel that NASA took out of operation in September after nine decades of distinguished research. As it turns out, the Langley Research Center has long been a cornucopia of wind tunnels large, small, and often specialized. In the early 1990s, NASA said that the Hampton, Va., facility had 23 major wind tunnels, along with an unspecified number of other wind tunnels. (We haven't been able to come up with a more recent count.)

At Langley Laboratory, the forerunner to the LRC, the first major U.S. government wind tunnel went into operation in June 1920. Pictured here, it was a replica of a 10-year-old British design, according to NASA.