Reusing the past to build the future

2016-04-01

One man has been finding ways to stretch his budget and help Johnson Space Center at the same time. Nathan Moore from the Habitability Design Center in the Habitability and Human Factors Branch put his creative thinking skills to the test when tasked with developing the medium-fidelity Orion mock-up. Currently, the mock-up is being used for engineering-evaluation purposes but, eventually, it will be used for astronaut training.

Moore turned to a group on-site that helped him stretch his construction budget much further — the JSC Redistribution and Utilization (R&U) Branch. With the help of R&U, Moore has been able to repurpose excess property and find supplies needed to construct the mock-up piece by piece.

Looking at the operator console outside the mock-up, one might never have guessed that the frame was a repurposed structure made from parts waiting to be excessed in a laydown yard, and the flat-screened monitors and monitor stands were from the R&U warehouse. When looking closely at the nearby stand holding up the Orion hatch waiting to be installed, a little sign announcing that the stand was used to support spacesuits is visible. Now the stand houses a small winch and hitch that gives Moore the ability to move parts between the fabrication shop and the mock-up location.

The docking hatch mock-up was originally estimated to cost tens of thousands of dollars to construct if outsourced. Instead, Moore turned to R&U for supplies to build it himself. Recovering stock metals and manufacturing the hatch in-house reduced costs by about 90 percent. Even the aluminum lockers installed in the base of the Orion mock-up were built on-site from reclaimed stock aluminum.

Not only did R&U provide frames, electronics and metal stock for the construction of the operator console and the mock-up itself, R&U also gave Moore fasteners and tools used to construct, test and fabricate the mock-ups’ complicated assembly. In addition, surplus dumbbells previously used for astronaut training found their way through R&U to the Orion mock-up area. Moore used the dumbbells to load test structures in the Orion mock-up system instead of using the large overhead crane, which would have impacted other operations in the building,

Overall, Moore reused more than $92,000 in materials and tools in 2015 alone by taking advantage of R&U. By recovering and reusing these materials on-site, JSC avoided paying disposal and recycling costs. Moore already has plans to claim other resources from R&U in 2016.

The R&U warehouse has a variety of resources. Call 281-483-7947 or visit the JB3 website to access the Equipment Database (under “Quick Links”) and see what is available that you might be able to use today.

Jennifer Morrison
NASA Johnson Space Center

Nathan Moore stands outside the medium-fidelity Orion mock-up. Image Credit: Jennifer Morrison

Spacesuit engineers demonstrate how four crew members would be arranged for launch inside the Orion spacecraft, using a mockup of the vehicle at Johnson Space Center. Photo credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz