Marshall, SpaceX teams celebrate engines of success | Technology Today | theredstonerocket.com – Theredstonerocket

When the big ring of nine Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 rocket rumbled to life, propelling NASAs SpaceX Crew-1 spacecraft and its occupants to their historic rendezvous with the International Space Station, most spectators were watching for the customary bloom of smoke and fire.

Steve Gaddis, Marshall Space Flight Center lead for the agencys Commercial Crew Program, and his team were also listening, anticipating the musical sound of success. At 6:27 p.m. Nov. 15, they heard it.

SpaceX and NASA test engineers at Marshall spent months reviewing data from Merlin engine tests performed at the SpaceX test facility in McGregor, Texas, prior to delivery to NASAs Kennedy Space Center for the launch. Its teamwork Marshall knows well; workers there developed the most powerful engines ever built, from the Apollo and space shuttle eras through todays mighty Space Launch System engines.

We conduct critical design reviews for all elements, components, and subsystems of the engines our commercial partners use to propel their rockets, said Gaddis, who is also deputy manager of the programs Launch Vehicle Systems Office at Marshall.

He compared the task to a symphony orchestra rehearsing for a big performance. Each test engineer on the team is a virtuoso, he suggested, a subject matter expert and mastering a new engine is like playing a new work by a master composer.

We have the A-team here, he said, from our vehicle and systems engineers to subject matter experts in turbopump design, rotordynamics, structural resonance, flow-induced vibration, materials and processes, the whole nine yards.

But its not enough to perform flawlessly in ones own area. Each contributor has to play in sync with all the rest. Our team identifies even the most minute performance issues and brings recommended safety and reliability solutions back to the whole team which tweaks interrelated components and refines the design as needed, Gaddis said.

Even small changes to one component can have ripple effects, fundamentally changing design and safety specifications across the entire engine. Change one note and the whole composition has to be reconsidered.

Everyone plays their part, Mark Darden, a Marshall engineer who specializes in rotordynamic analysis, said. The work, when its most successful, is a grand compromise, a give-and-take approach to find balance.

It all comes down to vibration and stability. These are massively intricate machines, each with precise vibration characteristics, he said.

Fellow Marshall dynamics engineer Tony Fiorucci agreed. Even the slightest imbalance or vibration outside margins can be catastrophic, hence the rigor of testing and analysis, he said.

It is fitting that such checkout work is performed at Marshall. At the turn of the century, engine designers there sought to deliver Fastrac, an innovative turbopump rocket engine that would offer NASA and its partners an alternative to the space shuttle main engine, then the workhorse of the agencys shuttle fleet. The Fastrac program was shuttered in 2001, but SpaceX leveraged much of the design and technology to aid development of its original Merlin 1A engine.

Darden and Fiorucci, colleagues at Marshall for more than three decades, are quick to note they stand on the shoulders of giants leveraging decades of engine test data and analytical techniques from the Saturn Vs F-1 engines, the RS-25s that powered the shuttle, and countless unique engine development efforts along the way.

Weve banked a long history of criteria, strategy, and proven methodologies, Fiorucci said. Since we began partnering with SpaceX, weve added hundreds more engine tests to our database, refining our expertise and continuing our consistent build methodology reaching back to the earliest days of U.S. rocket engine development.

That legacy anchored Marshall engine tests from qualification and acceptance testing to integration, checkouts, and shipping to Kennedy for launch, said Aerodyne Industries propulsion systems engineer Crystal Klemmer, part of the Jacobs team at Marshall that supported Merlin testing and monitored engine performance during the launch.

It felt surreal to be on console for the Crew-1 launch, she said. Its one thing to watch on TV. Its a completely different experience to have streaming data, several audio channels, and procedures and sequences to monitor. Its a huge accomplishment for SpaceX and for NASA.

That accomplishment was self-evident as the Crew-1s engines thundered to life a fanfare for uncommon men and women of talent, vision, and meticulous skill.

Music to our ears, Gaddis said.

The Commercial Crew Program unites NASA and industry to develop and fly new generations of crewed space transportation systems, extending humanitys reach into the solar system and forging a path back to the Moon and on to Mars.

Editors note: Rick Smith, a Manufacturing Technical Solutions employee, supports Marshalls Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications.

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Marshall, SpaceX teams celebrate engines of success | Technology Today | theredstonerocket.com - Theredstonerocket