To reduce the risk of first-time operations with one-of-a-kind spaceflight hardware for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), the agency built a core stage pathfinder similar in size, shape and weight to the 212-foot-tall core stage.

Like SLS, the core stage pathfinder will be doing something that's never been done - testing new shipping and handling equipment and procedures from the manufacturing site to the test site to the launch site.

Three companies helped build the pathfinder, joining more than 1,000 other American businesses that have contributed to building NASA's deep-space rocket.

Alabama companies Radiance Technologies and Dynetics of Huntsville and G and G Steel of Russellville worked to build and assemble the core stage pathfinder.

The steel simulator will travel by commercial barge from G and G Steel's Cordova factory to NASA's rocket factory, the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Later, it will make its way on NASA's barge Pegasus to the agency's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis in Mississippi, and then to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In all these NASA facilities, the core stage pathfinder will help technicians practice critical operations for handling and transporting flight hardware and enable them to fit check the hardware before the actual core stage arrives at their facilities.

NASA Completes Welding of Liquid Oxygen Tank for First SLS Flight
In other SLS news, NASA is another step closer to completing all main structures for the agency's first launch of the Space Launch System deep space rocket. The liquid oxygen flight tank was recently built in the Vertical Assembly Center robotic welder at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

After the liquid oxygen tank was inspected, it was moved to another area for plug welding to fill the holes left by the friction stir welding process. Five major parts - the engine section, liquid hydrogen tank, intertank, liquid oxygen tank and forward skirt -will be connected together to form the 212-foot-tall core stage, the backbone of the SLS rocket.

Boeing, the prime contractor for the core stage, is welding the liquid hydrogen tank structure--the final major core stage structure to be built for the first integrated flight of SLS and Orion.

The liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks will hold 733,000 gallons of propellant to power the stage's four RS-25 engines that together produce more than 2 million pounds of thrust.

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Rocket fever launches UB students to engineering competition in New Mexico
Buffalo NY (SPX) Sep 11, 2017
Ten students from UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences took a long drive from Buffalo to the desert of New Mexico in late June, with a rocket called Volans Tauri in tow. It was so hot, recalls Pete Wilkins, a rising senior majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering, that even under a tent, his camp chair melted from the 110-degree heat - and it was set up under a tent. ... read more

Related Links
Manufacturing and Materials at NASA
Rocket Science News at Space-Travel.Com

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