In his 2006 book Getting off the Planet: Training Astronauts, Randall Chambers notes, “Very early in the space program, amusement park rides were considered as possible research vehicles to study acceleration forces.” But Chambers, the scientist who trained all the early astronauts, soon realized that such machines wouldn’t take the extreme forces and sustained abuse needed to conduct serious studies on humans. For almost 50 years-it ceased government operation in 1996-the centrifuge was the world’s most powerful and versatile tool for studying the G forces that are an inescapable part of flight. The Johnsville human centrifuge-the machine everyone loved to hate-was operated by the Navy at its Naval Air Development Center (later the Naval Air Warfare Center) in Warminster, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Apollo 11’s Michael Collins called it “diabolical.” Time magazine referred to it as “a monstrous apparatus,” a “gruesome merry-go-round,” and, less originally, a “torture chamber.” John Glenn called it a “dreaded” and “sadistic” part of astronaut training.
