The mission of the National Aerothermochemistry and Hypersonics Laboratory (NAL) is to provide a venue for faculty, students, research associates and visiting scientists to improve our knowledge and control of non-equilibrium gaseous flows and their surface interactions. The resulting facility has been supported by the AFOSR, AFRL, ARO, NASA, NSF, ONR and Industry. A defining feature of the NAL is the suite of national resource quality hypersonic facilities, instrumentation and numerical methods. Most of these assets are one-of-kind, and were developed to address specific problems. A second defining characteristic of the laboratory is the student driven interdisciplinary culture, where researchers from various disciplines (Aerospace Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering) work side-by-side to solve complex problems.