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The Blue Abyss Training Facility Could Position Us as a Leader in the Commercialization of Space.

By Terry Troy

We had it. We lost it. Will we ever get it back?

Our city has a checkered past when it comes to space and aviation. We’re not referring to the checkered flags that once greeted Jimmy Doolittle as he flew around pylons at breakneck speeds during the Cleveland National Air Races back in the day.

At one time, our city was on the cutting edge of aviation and flight technology. Now, more than a century later, there’s a new project coming to Brook Park that could firmly place us on a leadership path once again, at the very precipice of an exciting new age.

In terms of its immediate business impact, the new Blue Abyss space and deep-sea training facility in Brook Park looks like just a small step. But it could be a giant leap for the business economy of Northeast Ohio.

The year is 1918. The first World War is over, and business is booming. Due to its position on the New York to Chicago rail and highway corridor, and with enthusiastic support from our Chamber of Commerce and local business groups, Cleveland is chosen as the first stop on an airmail network that runs from New York to San Francisco.

In 1925, Congress passes the Kelly Act (Air Mail Act) recognizing the role of the postal service in the financial development of commercial aviation. Airlines will receive 80% of the revenue for the mail they carry.

If the act wouldn’t have passed, commercial aviation, as we know it today, would not exist.

That same year, Cleveland city officials and Army Air Service personnel select 1,040 acres at Brookpark Road and Riverside Drive, and Cleveland Hopkins International Airport is born. It is the birth of successful commercial and civil aviation.

Less than four years later, Cleveland’s National Air Races become a major American event, promoting air travel and advancing aircraft research and development. Companies like Thompson Products (later TRW) and Bendix Corp., sponsor eponymous air races that, at least on the surface, cement our city’s future as a pioneer in flight and aviation.

Then, at the brink of World War II, local authorities and military officials choose Cleveland as the site of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’s (NACA) new research laboratory. More than 80 years later, known today as NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center, it is one of 10 centers and still a leading economic contributor to our economy in Northeast Ohio. It employs more than 3,000 people — both civil servants and contractors, many at very high-paying engineering positions.

The number of technological advancements pioneered at Glenn Center and the contributions made to aerospace engineering and space flight are too numerous to list.

“But we really haven’t benefited economically from the technology that was developed here,” says Dr. John Sankovic, president of the Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI), who also had a distinguished 30-year-plus career at

NASA. “A lot of the economic benefit happened in Alabama, California and Florida, but it didn’t really happen here.”

But that hasn’t stopped Sankovic from being a champion of the aerospace industry, NASA Glenn Research Center and all of Ohio, especially our region.

“Most people don’t know that we have a tremendous aerospace industry in Ohio,” he says. “We have research and development not only at NASA, but also down at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base with the Air Force Research Laboratory.”

But have we made the most of it?

“At my last job at NASA, I would look outside my window and see the Shuttle Centaur rocket engine,” says Sankovic. “That hydrogen/oxygen rocket technology was pioneered by Abe Silverstein, who I believe was a greater rocket scientist than Wernher von Braun.

“We developed that technology, pioneered it. But when I picked up my eyes and looked across the fence and all around the airport region, there were not that many jobs that came from it.”

That could all be in the past. Sankovic and the OAI recently played a key role in inking a deal with Blue Abyss Diving Ltd., for what amounts to a $250 million astronaut/deep sea diver bootcamp. It will be used to build a training facility for microgravity environments that offer an augmented reality of space in a 164-footdeep pool. The facility will also be used to train offshore maritime divers by creating practical human interfaces with autonomous robotic technology for offshore and underwater commercial and defense projects.

The project has been reported to be nearly identical to a similar major facility Blue Abyss is building in the United Kingdom in the County of Cornwall in Southwest England. Ours is expected to come online in 2025.

“The pool will have currents that simulate a deep sea environment or lighting that mirrors what an astronaut might see in terms of the stars, sun and moon,” says Richard Tanner, maritime leader for Blue Abyss.

— Richard Tanner

In terms of deep sea, “a facility like this is well overdue.

“When you are dealing with research and development, especially with robotic, offshore, autonomous underwater vehicles, you can’t put your units in a small pool or the pond on an industrial site, and then go out to Lake Erie or the Atlantic for the actual job. That’s a big jump in terms of making sure your equipment is right for the job or whether or not you are able to train the human interface.”

Obviously, there is a growing demand for deep sea training and the testing of underwater vehicles worldwide.

“Just look at the growth of offshore wind farms,” says Tanner, who is a veteran of the British Royal Navy Submarine Service. “That industry alone is causing a huge increase in the need for autonomous underwater vehicles for repair and servicing.”

For marine and offshore industries, the facility is sure to attract interest from companies that design and build robotic devices and autonomous vehicles, including robotic arms, 3D autonomous cameras or the actual robots that will be doing the underwater work, most of which need to be controlled from a mother ship on the surface. And there are literally hundreds of different companies that are involved in their manufacture from smaller companies all the way up to Tier One suppliers, says Tanner.

The other, and perhaps more compelling use of the facility, will be to train astronauts and space workers who will pioneer the future exploration and commercialization of space.

“I suspect that we will eventually have to build more than one pool because we are seeing such an increase in both space tourism, but also the commercialization of space,” Tanner says. “Remember all the space walks happen underwater first before they happen in space. You really need to train for that weird environment, especially when it comes to commercialization.”

There are a lot of companies that want to put space stations up there, and the testing of the equipment and the human element will be what the Blue Abyss Brook Park facility will handle. Training in a pool offering an augmented reality that mirrors space is practical, “because once you’re up there, if you make a mistake, you’ve had it. You can’t just call a taxi and head back down,” says Tanner.

Another element of the facility will be a hotel that caters to space tourists on the high end all the way down to contractors who are hired to work in space and might live in a more frugal environment.

When paired and partnered with the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and Sandusky and Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the new facility will create a nexus of training that simply can’t be ignored by the aerospace industry and academia. It will also likely be a key economic driver for the aerospace industry and avionics engineering.

The commercialization of space could grow into a trillion-dollar-plus business, thanks to the new commercial U.S. space race that includes companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

According to Sankovic, that race could further grow what is already a very healthy industry in Northeast Ohio, which has major companies and suppliers that stretch out from Cuyahoga well into Lake and Lorain counties.

“Just look at some of the aerospace companies we already have, like Component Repair Technology (CRT) machine shops like Fredon and PCC Airfoil or Parker Hannifin with its gas turbine division making fuel injectors,” says Sankovic. “We have approximately 165,000 people employed in the aerospace industry in Ohio alone.

“It’s also very important to our area in terms of our global exports. The No. 1 business export from Ohio to the U.K. is aerospace,” adds Sankovic. “I would have thought it would be soybeans or corn, or even automotive parts. But aerospace is No. 1, and it is by a factor of three to the No. 2 business, which is automotive. Aerospace is also our No. 1 export to Australia.”

“The No. 1 business export from Ohio to the U.K. is aerospace. I would have thought it would be soybeans or corn, or even automotive parts. But aerospace is No. 1, and it is by a factor of three to the No. 2 business, which is automotive. Aerospace is also our No. 1 export to Australia.”

— Dr. John Sankovic

So how did the Blue Abyss deal happen? Let’s just call it the science of the schmooze.

According to John Vickers, founder and CEO of Blue Abyss, the company’s site selection effort started over a year ago, with two London-based folks: David Townsend of the Value Partners Group and Howard Goulden of Howard Kennedy LLP, who were advocates of locating a research facility in Ohio. Townsend is a long-time supporter of doing international business in Ohio, while Goulden found the idea of a possible Ohio location as increasingly compelling.

“They reached out and we made a connection,” recalls Sankovic. “They told us they had a company that wanted to help train astronauts, so I met their CEO [John Vickers] on a Zoom meeting. They were all set to go to Houston, but they were also very respectful of my background. I told them we were right next to NASA. We have a connection to industry and academia. And we graduate 12,000 engineers a year, so why don’t you consider Ohio? Cleveland is a cool place because we are a big city. And we are also close to a Great Lake.

“Then I ran some of our microgravity activities by them, including the flights we have out of Cleveland.”

You might have seen these on the news or heard about them through other media. In the vernacular of the peasantry, the flights are sometimes referred to as the “vomit comet.”

During a parabolic or zero-gravity flight, the pilot will make a specific maneuver — the parabolic maneuver — several times to recreate the state of weightlessness inside an aircraft for 22 seconds.

“We must have done over a thousand of those parabolas out of Cleveland,” says Sankovic. “We also have a drop tower and have developed other microgravity experiments for the Space Station.”

As they continued to talk, Sankovic could sense a rapport.

“We talked about the historical work that NASA has done in microgravity research going all the way back to the ’60s, and I told them that NASA also has another facility near Sandusky,” he says. “They were also interested in Ohio because Columbus had Ohio State and the Dayton region had all it has to offer with Wright-Patterson.”

This includes its involvement with Aerospace Medicine and the large centrifuge that NASA uses, says Sankovic

That meeting convinced Vickers and others at Blue Abyss to come to Ohio for an 11-day whirlwind tour last year. They went to Sandusky, where they toured the NASA Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility (formerly known as Plum Brook Station), a 6,400-acre remote test installation site that contains the world’s largest Space Simulation Vacuum Chamber.

Measuring 100 feet in diameter and 122 feet high, it was used for testing the Mars lander systems and International Space Station hardware. The facility is also home to the Reverberant Acoustic Test Facility, the world’s most powerful acoustic test chamber, which can simulate the noise of a spacecraft launch up to 163 decibels (as loud as the thrust of 20 jet engines). Its Mechanical Vibration Facility is the world’s highest capacity and most powerful spacecraft shaker system, subjecting test articles to the rigorous conditions of launch.

The facility also houses an In-Space Propulsion facility, the world’s only facility capable of testing full-scale upper stage launch vehicles and rocket engines. The Combined Effects Chamber simulates a space environment where large scale liquid hydrogen experiments can be conducted safely.

“We then drove down to Dayton and toured the facility at Wright-Patt, made it to Columbus for a few meetings, and I had them back up to the Union Club by 10 p.m. the same day,” Sankovic recalls. “We spent the whole week, and every day was pretty much the same way.”

Then came the meeting at OAI headquarters, where Brook Park Mayor Edward Orcutt and Paul Marnecheck, commissioner of economic development for the city, were in attendance.

“So Paul and I were there listening to the presentation by Mr. Vickers, and during the presentation he mentioned that they needed at least two criteria to be met,” says the mayor.

The first was that they wanted to be close to a major NASA research center like John Glenn.

“So right away we could check that box,” says Orcutt. “The other was that they needed to be next to a major urban airport because part of the training would involve going up in a plane to simulate microgravity. That’s when I raised my hand and said, ‘I want you to know that we have 18 acres right outside the gates of NASA and right across the street from the airport that we would like to show you’ — and we did it that day.

“Seven and a half months later, and here we are.”

For Blue Abyss, it was a dream come true.

“Working alongside both the Ohio Aerospace Institute and the City of Brook Park has been an absolute pleasure,” says Vickers. “Both organizations have been superb. The OAI in setting up the idea of us coming to Ohio and the introduction to the mayor and commissioner of economic development for Brook Park, plus their ongoing and unstinting support for our business plans.

“And the City of Brook Park — well, from our very first meeting, the mayor told me he knew where we would be sited!”

For his part, Orcutt offers a lot of credit to the work of NASA, the OAI and the various levels of federal, state and city governments.

“Obviously NASA is funded by our federal government, but we also worked with our representatives like Senator Sherrod Brown and house representatives Max Miller and Shontel Brown,” he says. “They sent a letter to President Biden requesting more funding, and it was put into the budget.”

“Both Mayor Orcutt and Paul Marnecheck, the commissioner of economic development, have been the perfect model of support, efficiency and the epitome of folks you would hope were helping bring new businesses to an area,” adds Vickers. “They have been a pleasure to deal with, great advocates for Brook Park and the wider Cleveland Northeast Ohio areas, plus just fantastically committed and driven to their utmost for both us and their city.”

It sounds like Blue Abyss is sold on our area.

“We already have plans for expansion and look forward to beginning the educational and community outreach we discussed with the mayor when we first met with him,” Vickers adds.

In the years ahead, space commercialization will expand from operating in the lower orbits just 250 miles above the earth to orbits that go all the way up to and beyond the moon.

That’s a lot of infrastructure, most of which will be developed by commercial space companies that will have to test their equipment designs and train their personnel right here. Hopefully, the new training facility has made Northeast Ohio a player in what may grow to be a trillion-dollar-plus industry.

What is the OAI?

The Ohio Aerospace Institute was founded in 1989 as a joint initiative of the NASA Glenn Research Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory at WrightPatterson Air Base, the state of Ohio and 10 public and private universities granting doctoral degrees in aerospace-related engineering disciplines, as well as numerous companies engaged in aerospace activities.

The organization encourages companies to partner with it on contracts with NASA, the Department of Defense and others as well as to build collaborative teams with other industries, government and academic partners. It is also actively involved in obtaining grants funding and assistance in business planning.

The OAI is a 501c (3) not-for-profit organization. Dr. John Sankovic is its fifth president and CEO.