05-12-2023 MAW - Flipbook - Page 13
Baltimore Sun Media | Friday, May 12, 2023 13
Bases
from Page 12
NSA Annapolis is home to more than
600 military and civilian employees.
Naval Support Facility Indian Head
Founded in 1890, as a gun test facility
on the Potomac River in Charles County,
approximately 30 miles south of Washington, D.C., Naval Support Facility Indian
Head has evolved and expanded to include
numerous missions serving all branches
of the military — Navy, Air Force, Army
and Marines. The installation represents
a diverse and strategically important mix
of research and development activities,
alongside operational support programs
that are protecting the U.S. homeland from
terrorist threats.
Its main tenant is the Indian Head Naval
Surface Warfare Center, which researches,
develops and tests explosives, pyrotechnics
and propellants for application in warfighting systems. About three-fourths of all
explosives deployed in U.S. weapons were
developed at Indian Head.
Naval Air Station Patuxent River
Also known as NAS Pax River, the St.
Mary’s County naval air station near the
mouth of Patuxent River is headquarters
to the Naval Air Systems Command. The
Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division and the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School
are among programs located there.
The site was commissioned in April 1943,
after the onset of World War II required an
expansion of armed forces and significant
changes to naval aviation’s infrastructure.
Naval Air Station Patuxent River was built
to centralize widely dispersed air testing
facilities that had been established prior
to World War II.
Radar fire control, radar tracking, airfield
lighting and instrument landing techniques were developed and refined at NAS
Patuxent River. The first U.S. all jet-powered airplane, the XP-59A, and the FD-1
Phantom, the first Navy all-jet airplane to
operate from a carrier, were tested at Pax
River. The first U.S. test of the adaptability
of jet aircraft to shipboard operations was
conducted by the Naval Air Test Center,
and test pilots were exposed to ejection
seats here.
Most notably, four of the seven original
seven astronauts selected to the country’s
new space program in 1959 were graduates of the test pilot school at Pax River.
In 1961, former Navy test pilot Alan Shepard became the first American in space. A
year later, three test pilots from Pax River
became the first Americans to orbit the
earth.
Carderock Division of Naval Surface
Warfare Center
Camp David
The Carderock Division is a state-ofthe-art research, engineering, modeling
and test center for U.S. Navy ships and
ship systems. Headquartered in West
Bethesda with other sites around the country, it serves both U.S. naval forces and the
maritime industry. The Caderock facility
consists of multiple test basins, including
the David Taylor Model Basin, one of the
largest ship model basins in the world.
The facility provides research, development, test and evaluation, analysis, acquisition support, in-service engineering,
logistics and integration of surface and
undersea vehicles and associated systems.
Science and technology associated with
naval architecture and marine engineering
is also developed here.
The Carderock Division supports a
broad range of educational outreach
programs, with the long-term goal of building a relevant and capable future STEM
workforce. Educational programs span
from early elementary school science labs
through university graduate-level-directed
research. Students work side-by-side with
engineers, scientists and technicians on a
variety of challenging, hands-on activities which not only reinforce the basics
tenets of engineering and physics, but show
students the importance of these principles
in the work the Navy does every day.
Officially known as the Naval Support
Facility Thurmont, Camp David is best
known as the retreat for the President of
the United States, located in the Catoctin
Mountain Park in Frederick County. It’s
approximately a 30-minute helicopter ride
from the White House. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt named it “Shangri-La” in 1942,
but it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower
who came up with the more permanent
name in honor of his father and grandson,
both named David.
Walter Reed National Military Medical
Center
Walter Reed, sometimes referred to as
Bethesda Naval Hospital or Navy Med,
opened in 2011 after the Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC) of 2005
merged the former Walter Reed Army
Medical Center in Washington, D.C., with
the National Naval Medical Center on the
Bethesda campus. The medical center
combined the Army, Navy, Air Force and
Uniformed Services University healthcare
systems.
Walter Reed is the world’s largest military medical center, with 2.4 million square
feet of clinical space and providing care and
services to more than 1 million beneficiaries annually. The campus also holds the
Naval Medical School, Naval Dental School
and Naval Medical Research Institute.