NASA rocket will use aluminum made in Q-C
- Font Size:
- Default font size
- Larger font size
By Jennifer DeWitt | Saturday, September 15, 2007 |
As NASA works to put man back on the moon — and someday on Mars — Alcoa’s Davenport Works plant finds itself on the ground floor of the mission.
NASA officials were at the Riverdale, Iowa, plant Friday for their second visit since the space agency awarded Alcoa a $16.7 million contract in July for the Ares 1 project. Under the one-year contract, Alcoa will produce about 1 million pounds of aluminum for the Ares 1 crew launch vehicle upper stage — the rocket that will carry the next generation of explorers into space.
Davenport Works, the only Alcoa plant in North America that produces aluminum plate for the aerospace industry, will develop an aluminum lithium alloy — Alloy 2195 — for the project. Ares 1 is a two-stage rocket that will transport the Orion crew exploration vehicle with up to six astronauts to low-Earth orbit.
“That vehicle will be the same vehicle we will use in going to Mars someday,’’ Jeff Hanley, NASA’s manager of the Constellation Project Office, told reporters Friday. He said NASA’s goal is to return to the moon by June 2019. The last time America landed on the moon was December 1972.
“This really gets the American human space flight program back to its roots,” said Hanley, whose visit was a homecoming of sorts. The Bettendorf native graduated in 1979 from Bettendorf High School. “This is something many of us came to the agency to do. It’s what drew us to the agency.”
Steve Cook, manager of the Ares Launch Vehicle Project, one of the projects included in the Constellation program, said the product Alcoa will produce will be used for key parts of the Ares 1. “We contracted enough material … to take us into the flight testing process,” he said. “We bought enough material to last us awhile.”
Cook said the new aluminum product will be used in a sizable vessel structure that measures 84 feet long and 18 feet in diameter. “It holds the propellant tank of the rocket.”
After Alcoa produces the material, the aluminum will be sent to other partner companies, which will form the metal into the required shapes.
Eventually, NASA will build and fly two Ares flight vehicles. They will be assembled and manufactured at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, he said. Those contracts have not yet been bid, but Alcoa now will be a certified vendor of Alloy 2195.
Tony Morales, Alcoa’s global marketing director of aerospace, said, “This is a statement of NASA’s confidence in Alcoa to deliver a new production in the quantity, the quality and in the time it needs.”
“It’s great for us to be involved in the next generation of manned space flight,” he said, adding that Alcoa aluminum has been on every commercial jet as well as in the past space programs.
To land the advanced manufacturing contract, Alcoa had to develop a new process, “a different flow path” to make the alloy, Morales said.
He said the Ares contract does not create any new jobs at Davenport Works, “but it does create job security” to be involved in a new aerospace program that will go out past 2020. “If we deliver on time, on quality and on target, that’s exactly where we want to be.”
Cook said Ares 1 has an annual budget of about $1 billion for five years. The project, headquartered out of the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., involves more than 2,000 NASA employees at sites across the nation.
According to Hanley, the new space travel program returns NASA to its roots. While the next generation of spacecraft “will stress technology, it also will be borrowing heavily from 40 years ago. The engine draws its heritage from the Saturn 500.”
“The Orion looks like Apollo on the outside, but it will have modern avionics … it will be a state-of-the-art vehicle,’’ he said.
Jennifer DeWitt can be contacted at (563) 383-2318 or jdewitt@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
del.icio.us
Digg
NewsVine
Fark
redditMore Stories By Jennifer DeWitt
» More Local Stories
Highest Rated Articles from the last 7 Days
- Discount Magazines
- Save up to 80% off the Cover Price. Select from your favorites.
- www.MagazineOutlet.com
- Cheap Airfare
- Compare multiple travel sites. Discount web fares made easy.
- www.LowFares.com
- Find a Hunter AAF Lawyer
- Browse Lawyer Listings in Hunter AAF. Compare Profiles & Credentials. Free in-depth Research. FindLaw.com.
- lawyers.findlaw.com
- Ads by Yahoo!
