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GCN Home > 06/09/08 issue

Video surveillance on the fly

NASA meshes cameras with wireless network to help secure new facility

By William Jackson

When NASA signed a 20-year lease in September on an unused hangar in Palmdale, Calif., to house two specialized research aircraft, the man charged with protecting those planes faced a serious challenge.

The planes, the Boeing 747 Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy and DC-8 Airborne Laboratory, are operated by NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, which is a tenant at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. But there was not enough room for the new project on the base, so “we’re leasing a hangar from the Los Angeles airport authority,” said William Crews, Dryden’s chief of security.

With five acres under one roof, the hangar has a colorful past. It originally was a Rockwell International production facility for the B1 Bomber.

Since the production line was shut down, it has been rented to moviemakers, most recently for the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” installment. Despite its high-profile history, the Palmdale hangar had sparse security features. There was only minimal perimeter fencing and no access control, intrusion-prevention, video surveillance or public-alert system.

“It wasn’t to the level that NASA required to protect such one-of-a-kind national assets,” Crews said.

To strengthen security, NASA has been planning a substantial investment in an IP video surveillance and access control system at Palmdale, and Crews said he is still going down that path. But NASA handed him a more immediate problem. “The schedule for moving in the two aircraft was ‘moved to the left’ on their timeline. That accelerated my timeline.”

Crews had just 60 days before arrival of the multimillion-dollar, one-of-a-kind aircraft — not nearly enough time to deploy the permanent system. “The problem was how to put some sort of security in place so at a minimum to have a defensible perimeter,” he said.

The obvious answer was boots and guns, but security employees are expensive. He settled on a force multiplier in the form of a tactical video surveillance system from AgileMesh using a wireless mesh network from Firetide.

Fast setup

Crews first saw AgileMesh’s Camera Deployment Unit at a trade show last summer. “It looked like something that could be rapidly deployed and easily configured,” he said. That was what he needed: Something security employees could set up without the help of engineers.

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