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Google will finish vast revamp of Hangar One in Mountain View by 2025
Site could become hub for tech, space and aviation breakthroughs



By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: May 6, 2022 at 11:59 a.m. | UPDATED: May 6, 2022 at 2:34 p.m.

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Google aims to complete a mammoth revamp of the iconic Hangar One in Mountain View by 2025. NASA officials said Friday they hope the Moffett Field site can become a hub for tech, space and aviation breakthroughs in the future.

The tech titan entered a 60-year lease with NASA in 2015 to take over the space. The company’s Planetary Ventures unit began a vast restoration this week.

When asked by this news organization whether Google and the nation’s space and aviation agency could capture plenty of synergies when the tech titan moves into Hangar One, Eugene Tu, director of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, replied, “Absolutely.”

“Google is about data and information and that is what we are about as well, particularly scientific and engineering data and information,” Tu said in the interview.

The NASA official sees plenty of ways that Google and the space agency can collaborate closely once the search giant establishes its Planetary Ventures unit inside Hangar One after the project is complete.

“We are collecting so much information from our space and science satellites trying to understand what is happening with our home planet and what is happening to it in the future,” Tu said. “A lot of the technologies and capabilities that Google develops, especially in machine learning (and) data mining will be synergistic and very helpful.”

The mammoth construction project itself, which is being managed by commercial real estate firm CBRE on behalf of Google and Planetary Ventures, is expected to start adding the cladding — the exterior of the hangar — sometime in 2023, said Alex Saleh, a CBRE executive.

“Construction is going to finish in 2025,” Saleh told this news organization.

A years-long effort led by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat whose district encompasses parts of Santa Clara County and San Mateo County, including Mountain View, overcame the one-time preference on the part of both NASA and the U.S. Navy to demolish the landmark due to the expense of a full-fledged rescue of the hangar, which was born in 1932 as a Depression-era construction project that employed hundreds and housed the USS Macon airship.

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The hangar is so vast and high that the Statue of Liberty, if removed from its pedestal, could stand upright inside Hangar One. San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, if laid on its side, could be tucked away inside the cavernous space.

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2022/0...e-real-estate/