and avionics) and attaches the core stage to the upper stages, notably the Orion crew module. Once assembled, Boeing’s core stage will stand 212 feet (65 meters) tall. To produce it, more than 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) of welds will be required, using an advanced friction-stir method in which a rapidly rotating pin generates heat that fuses metallic materials. Fabrication specialist Nick Acosta Mora works in the intertank and thrust beam assembly area. He is one of more than 300 Boeing employees based at Michoud, which is owned by NASA. At his workstation entrance, a plaque describes how 18,500 bolts are needed to fasten these specific parts together. Among his responsibilities, Acosta Mora drills holes into a lime green thrust beam that attaches to fittings for the solid rocket boosters. The idea of supporting deep space exploration keeps him highly motivated while on the job. “It’s easy to get lost in the whole assembly, the nuts and bolts, but it’s also kind of wild,” Acosta Mora said. “This is going to move humanity forward and I’m pretty happy doing it—who gets to go to work every day and say they build rockets?” Michoud, an eight-decade-old facility that covers a former sugar plantation, previously produced military airplanes during wartime and manufactured Saturn I, IB and V rockets and space shuttle external tanks. To accommodate the Space Launch System, the ground floor, or high bay, of the Vertical Assembly Center had to be reinforced. Ninety tons (80 metric tons) of concrete, 6 miles (10 kilometers) of rebar and more than 100 steel pilings form a foundation strong enough to support not only the neon blue welding Photo: The Space Launch System’s liquid hydrogen tank, shown from the inside, consists of five huge barrels welded together at Michoud Assembly Facility, in New Orleans. 18 | BOEING FRONTIERS
Frontiers December 2016 Issue
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