What a Garage! | God's World News
What a Garage!
Science Soup
Posted: April 22, 2015

In this garage, it’s always summer. Visitors stroll through clusters of rainforest trees. They walk along a beach. They play mini golf. Some fly overhead in hot air balloons. Listen! You can even hear a waterfall in the distance! What kind of garage is this?

Well, it isn’t a garage anymore. But it used to be. A hangar is a huge garage-like building. It holds airships. This hangar stretches about 1,000 feet long. It stands about 350 feet high. The Statue of Liberty could fit inside! Now a company has turned the hangar into a beach resort called Tropical Islands. The temperature inside the hangar always measures 77 degrees. Plants can grow there all year.

From the outside, the resort looks like a big, white dome. From the inside it looks like a paradise. The hangar took almost 14,000 tons of steel to build. Airships once used two huge doors to go in and out. Each door took 20 minutes to open! But no one uses those doors now. Tropical Islands even replaced part of the roof with a material that lets sun in. Did you visit in the middle of winter? No problem! You can still get a natural tan!

Other companies use hangars too. Google rents a hangar from the U.S. Navy. That gives them 350,000 square feet of space! Google is paying $1.16 billion to rent the space for 60 years. They’re using the area to learn about space and flying.

Just imagine how big these airships must be! Even their garages are full of possibilities!