Community Corner
NASA Dirigible Hangar Up For Grabs
Eight square acres of steel-framed enclosed space -- imagine the possibilities.
By Bay City News
An enormous, historic steel skeleton of a hangar, in plain of view of motorists passing by Moffett Field on U.S. Highway 101, is being offered for private development, according to federal officials.
The U.S. General Services Administration and NASA, overseer of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, is seeking proposals to lease Hangar One at the airfield, officials said Wednesday.
The proposed long-term lease of Hangar One "offers a unique opportunity for the private sector to collaborate with the government to reposition and manage federal-owned property for private and public sector use," officials said in a release requesting proposals.
Any use of the cavernous building would have to include preservingit as a historic structure, officials said.
Hangar One was built in the early 1930s to house "lighter than air" dirigibles until two of the air-filled aircraft crashed in Californiaand the United States abandoned the program in the mid-1930s, officials said.
The hangar, with a footprint of eight acres, is 1,140 feet long,308 feet wide with 350,000 gross square feet inside the steel-framedbuilding.
The exposed steel frame remains because after its original metal siding deteriorated, the U.S. Navy removed but did not replace the siding and instead coated the frame with epoxy, officials said.
NASA was not able to provide the funds necessary to install new siding to protect it from the open air, officials said.
The hangar and former dirigible structures Hangar Two and Hangar Three at Moffett are part of the U.S. Naval Air Station Sunnyvale, California Historic District, listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 permits federal agencies such as NASA to lease out historic property, the officials said.
Hangar One's primary occupant in the 1930s was the U.S.S. Macon, a 6.5-million-cubic-foot dirigible that collapsed off the coast of California in a storm in 1935.
After the dirigible program ended, the Army Air Corps and Navy used the hangar for various missions until Moffett Field was decommissioned as a military base in 1991 and transferred to NASA.
Copyright © 2013 by Bay City News, Inc. -- Republication, Rebroadcast or any
other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc.
is prohibited.
