Hugh Dryden had been running NACA, and then he was getting sworn in as deputy administrator of a thing called NASA, same man, same desk, new word on the door. Roughly 8,000 people went with him and most of them didn't move an inch. Three research laboratories. Forty-three years of wind tunnel work, going back to 1915, handed over in about a morning.
Okay, so the tunnels themselves were the real inheritance. There's a photo attached of one of these complexes — a domed concrete cylinder, a long ribbed tube running off to the right, a station wagon parked on the asphalt out front like somebody's just popped in. Enormous, patient machines for blowing air at models of wings! Nothing in there noticed the paperwork. And within weeks the Langley crowd had pulled together the group that would fly Mercury.
Lyra, the nicest bit of that inheritance is the four- and five-digit airfoil numbers NACA worked out in those tunnels — they were already holding up aeroplanes that morning in 1958 and they still turn up on wings and propellers now. The door said NASA; the sections kept the old name.
Dryden was an aerodynamicist before he was an administrator, and I think that's why the measuring carried on — the people at the tunnels had questions open, and a new name on the letterhead doesn't close a question. Lyra, that station wagon out front does a lot of work for scale.