NASA’s Orion covers up for trip
Boat retailer helps protect module with shrink wrap
It was a vehicle ... just not the type that boat retailer MarineMax Houston typically shrink wraps for transportation.
NASA’s spacecraft will one day carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. But first, an Orion test vehicle needed to be transported from Texas to Ohio for an acoustic test. And it’d be a shame if roadside debris had nicked it — or worse, water got inside — before April when it’s slated to launch at more than 1,000 miles an hour to an altitude of 31,000 feet.
So NASA called MarineMax Houston, located just 4 miles down the street from Johnson Space Center on East NASA Parkway, for some shrink wrapping assistance.
“It was cool and unexpected,” said Billy Foulkes, MarineMax Houston service adviser.
He wouldn’t go as far as calling shrink wrap an art, but it does take some skill. And practice, which the company’s experienced technician Jose Vasquez had his helpers do on boxes and miscellaneous parts at the MarineMax Houston office.
The spacecraft itself took about eight hours and three rolls of shrink wrap measuring 25 feet wide by 75 feet long.
They created a bonnet-like cap to cover the top of the vehicle, which would have otherwise been open to the elements. Then, a cherry-picker was used to lift precut shrink wrap up and over the Orion, down the other side and back around the bottom. MarineMax employees repeated this going in the other direction to make an “X” shape.
They wrapped both sides of the “X”
again to create two layers of shrink wrap, securing it with tape and taking extra precautions to make sure adhesive did not get on the spacecraft. Finally, a heat gun caused the material to shrink and fit the spacecraft’s form.
NASA engineers watched the entire ordeal, especially concerned about the amount of heat applied to Orion. Such customer pressures are not uncommon for Foulkes.
“They were very meticulous,” he said, “which I could say not all my boat customers are, but a lot of them are very meticulous.”
For Sheila Pogue, who procured materials for the job and helped coordinate the scheduling, it was an especially notable experience because her grandfather was an astronaut. William Pogue piloted Skylab 4, the third and final time humans visited America’s Skylab space station, and spent 84 days in space.
She had visited the Space Center Houston museum countless times and gone into the Johnson Space Center offices with her mom, who used to work there in IT, on bring your kid to work days. But this time was different.
And before heading there to work, she took a picture wearing her grandfather’s flight jacket to show the NASA employees she would meet.
“Being on-site as a contractor, it felt different than paying for your ticket and riding the tram and listening to your tour guide,” she said.
And the employees loved her photo.
“While I was fangirling over them,” Pogue said, “they were like, ‘That’s so cool.’”
After being wrapped in mid-August (MarineMax Houston just announced its shrink wrapping adventure this week), the Orion test crew module was sent via truck to the Plum Brook Station testing facility at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio.
There it underwent testing in a specialized acoustic chamber, with noises louder than gunshots, fireworks or a jet taking off, to test its structural soundness. It passed this testing and returned to Johnson Space Center on Sept. 10, Jon Olansen, NASA project manager for Orion’s Ascent Abort-2 test, said in an email.
The April 2019 Ascent Abort-2 test in Cape Canaveral, Fla., is the final destination for this simplified module. It will be used to test Orion spacecraft’s abort system, which is designed to propel crew members away from the rocket, should an incident occur during launch.
And ultimately, after the test, it will lay to rest in the ocean — a more familiar terrain for the MarineMax Houston team.