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Home | Update | Latest Issue | Gallery | FR Profile | Datafiles | FR 5/97 ALPHA PARTS BUILT BY MCDONNELL DOUGLAS by Wolfdietrich Hoeveler FLUG REVUE is the first aviation magazine that was allowed to take a look into the largest clean-room on the Western coast of the US. The room has only been in operation since October of last year and is located at the McDonnell Douglas facilities in Huntington Beach, California. Soon, the five-floor room (2090 square meters) will host 50 employees, working in three shifts, who over the next three years will be assembling the following segments for the international space station Alpha: five elements for the lattice structure which is the back-bone of the space station, three pressure-stabilized docking adapters for the connection to the Space Shuttles and two supply and connecting modules. The room has the cleanest air in California, a maximum of 5/100 micron of particles being allowed in one cubic foot of air. The work includes drilling, screwing, and even welding. Disposals are immediately being sucked off. Still, employees having a beard must wear a mask and the world's probably cleanest hydraulic lift, the so called "snorkellift", is used on the deep-clean light gray high-polish floor. The final inspections for the structures and parts are also being conducted in this room. The lattice structures, up to twelve meters long and four meters wide in dimension, will be put together on working platforms which are exactly measured with theodolites and laser instruments. Holes will be manually drilled with extremely high precision. The first docking adapters were almost finished at the beginning of February. These parts will be carried on the first Shuttle flight for assembly in space, together with the first supply module and the function module from Russia. McDonnell Douglas will also supply subsystems such as a transport system, which will be built by Astro Aerospace as a sub contractor, and will also be responsible for the flight guidance and navigation including the data processing systems, supported by Honeywell Satellite Systems and Operations, the communication system and the detection system (through Lockheed Martin as subcontractor) and the temperature control system (large cooling wings) which has been given to Loral Vought Systems as the subcontractor. All together, more than 900 McDonnell Douglas employees are involved in the program, mainly at the company's plants in Huntington Beach and Monrovia, California, in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as, in Houston, Texas, and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The work on the space station generates an annual turnover of approximately $500 million over a period of four years. According to the current plans, this amounts to one fourth of NASA's annual expenditure for the space station. Still, following the planned mega-fusioning between McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, the leadership in all three product groups on the US side will go to Boeing since the company had already bought Rocketdyne half a year ago. From page 38 of FLUG REVUE 5/97 Home | Update | Latest Issue | Gallery | FR Profile | Datafiles | FR 5/97 Copyright 1997 by Motor-Presse Stuttgart. All rights reserved. Last updated March 30, 1997