Finally able to release the details and photos on this one for your reading enjoyment...
Long Story & photos >
****** NASA | 2007
****** has been left to sink into distant memory and the swamps that surround it. Even today, nature is regaining its dominance.
Trees have staked their claim on rooftops and a tumble of weeds encroach the tarmac.
What was a rocket and aerospace research and testing facility is now totally abandoned. Fifty miles from ******, with only one gate and some distance between itself and the real world, there is no doubt it has been totally forgotten until recently.
One mile's walk down the abandoned tarmac strip, the main facility lies to the left, comprised of approximately 10 buildings. To the unlucky or oblivious explorer, this facility is the highlight of the journey - but they would be mistaken.
Three miles south, and half a mile east lies a shed, modest in proportion compared to its friends up the road. It's also a much lighter construction, and has really suffered the elements. Half the roof is missing. All the windows are smashed. The corrugated tin walls fail to keep out the elements, and as a result, you could be forgiven for overlooking the rusted metal floor.
But if you walk over the floor, you'd notice that the aging metal would bow beneath your feet, and would trigger a deep echo, betraying the huge void below. Void is technically incorrect - there's a lot of empty space, granted, but there's also one (debatably two) NASA rockets.
dsankt and I had come prepared for our trip into space - the trip to the facility and silo below is not an easy one. After four miles of walking in cold and rain, our preparation was hanging heavy on our backs - the utopian idea of 'We'll take skateboards' had been aborted 15 meters after its execution - I can't skateboard, and the road had conveniently truck-sized holes in it.
Two miles into our walk, our destination still lingering on the horizon, and our car and equal distance behind us, we stopped dead in our tracks. Ahead was the hazy outline of a white van, driving slowly towards us. This was a dead end road, and we'd passed two locked gates. With no cover on a dead straight road, we couldn't run or hide. Our future thoughts of travelling to the US began to fade. We confirmed our only plausible excuse: we were geocaching. I set a cache mark on my GPS, and we waited for the car to approach. Tinted windows prevented us from seeing the occupant until it was on top of us. The driver cast us an unconcerned glance. Two seconds passed. I attempted the Australian Defusing Greeting Maneuver. I nodded in his direction. Two seconds passed. Without shifting his gaze at the road behind us, he lifted a finger off the steering wheel, completing the salutation. He continued driving, and we continued walking.
When the facility was originally abandoned, the staff seemed to employ an approach of 'security through isolation' - all attempts to lock up buildings had since rusted or were so half-assed you could step over them.
One thing they hadn't overlooked, however, was the sealing of the silo, despite the fact the execution still fits in the 'half assed' category - a patchwork quilt of mesh, steel plates and amateur welding technique. Explorers previous to us had hack sawed a small 2'x1' rectangle out of the middle of the silo cap.
We dropped a piece of glass down the hole. Seven seconds went by, and a distant thunk-splash sound boomed back, amplified by the shape of the silo. We exchanged a glance, and then headed towards our backpacks. We'd prepared for this.
Ten minutes went past, and our tinfoil space suits were ready. dsankt looked like subzero from Mortal Combat, and I unfortunately looked like I was wearing a reflective nappy. Functionality over fashion.
Deluxe version spacesuits. Michelin man suits are for fat people.
Now in the appropriate attire, we began to rig our ropes for our SRT descent into the silo. Finding a solid anchor in urbex locations can prove to be challenging, due to the often less-than-perfect state of the surroundings. There are a number of factors to consider, most obviously structural integrity, but also rope protection, and more importantly, contingency. If our gear failed while we were inside the silo, the choice would lie between dying from hunger, dying from a plummet, or dying from being consumed by a hungry friend choosing to delay dying by hunger.
Having established our rig from 2' RSJ, with a safety on a 1' beam, rope protection in place and gear double checked, dsankt harnessed up and began to squeeze himself into the tiny rusted hole in the floor. Finally clear, he glided into the darkness for about 5 meters, swung onto a staircase and secured the lower part of our rig. I began passing down our gear, and eventually harnessed up for my descent.
One of the more challenging and exciting aspects about urbex SRT is the non-standard situations you find yourself in - for example, attempting to shove yourself through a hole too small for you, while trying to feed rope and maintain control of your descender, so when eventually clear of the hole you don't plummet. Once safely upon the stairs, we had some time to marvel at where we were.
The upper rocket, as shot on the first floor.
In front of us, was a huge concrete cylinder. It didn't have the form that immediately suggested a rocket, but was incredibly impressive regardless. At 10' intervals around the silo huge anchors protruded from the walls, and the pattern repeated vertically, each floor with its own set of anchors and extinct lighting fixtures. We began the descent down the spiral staircases. Eight floors down we hit a floor, the bottom of the first rocket. The mesh floor, dangerously past its expiry date was warped and rusted. Jagged holes and deep protrusions leered at strange angles, twisted from the debris hurriedly hurled into the silo when the workers were leaving. We made our way to the far side of the silo and shone our torches upwards - and there it was - N A S A.
N A S A BABY
We picked our way back to the staircases, and made our way down further. Another rocket, another huge void. We went down as far as we could, but eventually came to water - the bottom of the silo disappeared into murky water of indeterminable depths, the shadows of lightshades and anchors barely visible.
The rocket and the staircases.
From here, we explored and took photographs for the best part of a few hours. The humidity was terrible. We sweated. Jackets and jumpers came off, but we sweated still. Our cameras fogged, the distant light above faded to a deep purple, and then black. Eventually, 4 hours later, after rigging back onto our lifeline and swinging out over the void, ascending hand over hand until I reached the gagged hole, I was back above ground. Exhausted, we hauled our gear back up, and an equally tired and dirty dsankt wrestled with the awkwardness of the exit.
I can't really remember packing up our gear or obscuring the entrance, or the details of the 4.5 mile walk back to the car.. The hour and a half walk was punctuated with periodic meanderings off the road as a result from walking with eyes closed, and with the stark contrast of the naked branches of winter trees dark across the burnt sky of ******, fading to the deep purple above.
You could almost imagine what it would have been like, years prior, to watch the building slowly roll away from the silo, the doors to open, the anchors shackled to the rocket, and the resulting inferno billowing up into the sky.
quantum-x / dsankt 2007 - shouts to ****** for his original work on this location, and to all those that knew and kept it quiet to preserve the location.