Virginia Sen. Mark Warner popped two yellow foam plugs in his ears and stared at a giant spool of tough, gray composite material gripped in a giant vise.

He was observing a "destructive test" conducted by structural engineers at NASA Langley Research Center on Monday to see just how tough that composite shell was — how much pressure it could take before it began to buckle and, ultimately, disintegrate.

At 30,000 pounds of squeeze, the spool cracked like a gunshot. That's what the earplugs were for. But the structure held.

As the pressure increased, the composite began to dimple and dent. More pops began to ring out, but none as loud as before.

Finding that sweet spot of collapse for composite materials — the kind used to build airplanes, for instance, or spacecraft or automobiles — and thus learn to build even better ones is a niche NASA Langley wants to carve out for itself.

Warner shares that vision.

"If we think about 30 years ago, Silicon Valley in northern California kind of carved out their brand — they were the information technology capital of the world," Warner said. "Composites has the potential in all its applications to be a huge industry. We'd like to make Hampton Roads the Silicon Valley of composites."

The FY2014 omnibus spending bill passed last month includes $25 million to fund composites research — half of what NASA originally requested, but officials say they want to leverage it into matching investments from industry partners as well as alliances with Virginia research universities.

The Hampton center is taking the lead in NASA's Advanced Composites Project, or ACP, said project manager Richard Young,

New and improved composites can make aircraft and automobiles lighter, stronger, more fuel-efficient and cheaper to produce, NASA says. They can also be used in the military and medical fields.

Developing composites can be a long and complex process — as long as 20 years from concept through certification, NASA says. Dreaming up next-generation composites is another challenge because industry, with tight production schedules, is loath to pull robotic systems out of production lines to use for research.

NASA Langley is positioning itself to take on that research role, and says it could shrink the timeline to only three to five years.

"It's kind of our role as a national lab," said research engineer Brian Stewart. "It's what we do."

This fall, NASA Langley expects to bring its own industrial robot online, he said, enabling engineers to digitally model and simulate composites production "from end to end" with high precision.

"That (ability) does not exist in composites right now," Stewart said. "This gives us the ability in a totally digital environment to feed that back into the analysis work … and we can also build plenty of test specimens."

NASA calls this new capability Integrated Structural Assembly of Advanced Composites, or ISAAC, and is only the third such machine built by aerospace company Electroimpact in Seattle.

Between ISAAC, the existing aerospace infrastructure and enlisting the right industry and academic partners, said Stewart, "we actually have the potential, between Petersburg and Norfolk, to create a regional identity that is known for composites research."

"My hope," said Warner, "is we can do the design but also the development, testing and then actual manufacturing here in this region. That would be great news as we continue to try to diversity our economy."