An overview of the facilities will be given, followed by three application examples. The first shows an approach to hypersonic shock tunnel characterization using Raman spectroscopy and molecular-tagging velocimetry. Second, the optical distortion induced by hypersonic boundary layers is quantified using highspeed imaging techniques and a novel analysis method. Third, the difficult-to-predict flow characteristics of transonic shock-induced separation are measured using a suite of diagnostics to build a validation data set for computational models.