Evan Cox

NASA has always been on the leading edge of technology development and application - not only in space exploration, but also in the areas of environmental compliance and resource stewardship. To that end, NASA is a leading proponent of field testing new and innovative technologies that will benefit their own site restoration program, as well as contributing to the wider application of cost-effective remedies for impacted environments. A common contaminant issue at NASA sites, as at other facilities where industrial solvents have been used, is the presence of trichloroethene (TCE) in groundwater.In the 1960s, Launch Complex 34 (LC-34) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was an active launch site for the Apollo program. As a result of TCE releases to groundwater during that period, TCE is now found in the sandy aquifer underlying the site in the form of a dense, non-aqueous phase liquid (DNAPL). NASA, through its Small Business Innovation Research initiative, selected Geosyntec to develop and implement a field testing program of bioaugmentation technologies to target TCE DNAPL in groundwater using LC-34 as the demonstration site with the goal of documenting and reporting the efficacy of this remediation technology to the scientific and engineering community. As part of this program, Geosyntec collaborated with the U.S. EPA Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation (SITE) program, which collected independent data to validate the bioaugmentation performance.