NASA's Sustainability Base: Bringing space-age technologies to earth

Background noise Steve Zornetzer I'm Steve Zornetzer, I'm the Associate Center Director here at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. And we are building a building of the future today here on planet Earth. This is called Sustainability Base, and it's named in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts landing at Tranquility Base on the Lunar Surface. The main goal of this building is to demonstrate that we can maximize the energy efficiency of a building, minimize its energy consumption and create an environment that's very pleasant and habitable for its occupants. If you think about NASA and its exploration goals for the future, when NASA sends astronauts to Mars, or somewhere else to create a habitat and live in that habitat for any extended period of time, that is a closed loop system. And we have to learn how to live in closed loop systems, both on distant planets, for example, or here on Earth. So this is a demonstration project of semi-closed loop system on planet Earth, where we're going to learn about water purification over longer periods of time for lots of people. We're going to learn about control systems and how to control an environment in an optimum way over long periods of time. The design of the building, which was developed by Bill McDonough, a very famous architect, was selected and developed based upon a number of philosophies, so when he walked around the campus of this building before it was designed, he got a sense of some of the interesting design features on other buildings here. So the largest wind tunnel in the world, which we can see off to our left, has an exoskeleton, he saw that and he says, why don't we do an exoskeleton for this building. 'Cause not only does it provide excellent structural stability in a seismic zone, but additionally by having an exoskeleton, we don't have any vertical support columns inside the building, maximizing the ability for natural light and natural airflow to penetrate the interior spaces of the building, thereby cooling the building and minimizing the need for overhead lighting. These kinds of technologies not only will benefit us here on the planet Earth, but also to take what we learn from this experiment and adapt it and utilize it in a habitat somewhere else in the future.

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