Having locally made items flying in space may be old hat to ATK Thiokol, but a couple of Salt Lake Valley companies joined the veteran voyager on the recent SpaceShipOne privately funded craft.
An ATK Thiokol tank built near Promontory, Box Elder County, held nitrous oxide to propel the ship during its suborbital flights. Chapman Innovations of Salt Lake City crafted materials used for the crew's flight suits and gloves and for heat protection in some areas of the spacecraft, and Matco of South Salt Lake provided wheels, brakes and axles.
Scaled Composites, a company led by designer Burt Rutan, last week captured the $10 million Ansari X Prize when SpaceShipOne flew into space twice in five days.
"From an awareness standpoint, it's fantastic," Matt Ford, vice president of sales for Chapman Innovations, said of his company's involvement. "We can associate our name and our product with a company and a group like Scaled Composites, and most importantly someone on the cutting edge of being innovative, from getting folks to space to the design of the craft they use all the way down to the clothing they wear.
"They approached it from the ground up, on everything, and I think it's rewarding for us that they recognized the value and the performance characteristics of our product matched the mission of the overall space flight and their goals."
Matco's expertise is in making wheels and brakes for sport aircraft and light aircraft, such as experimental and home-built planes. Its SpaceShipOne contributions were built to exacting standards, according to Martha Happ, whose husband, George Happ, owns the company.
The company modified existing wheels and disks for weight by making them all-aluminum. The first set delivered to Scaled Composites had a steel axle nut. "But they said they needed an aluminum axle nut, so we sent them back an aluminum axle nut," she said. "They were very conscious of weight savings for the whole SpaceShipOne project."
ATK Thiokol has had some component on every U.S. manned space flight, with the space shuttle solid-fuel rocket motors being the most well-known. For SpaceShipOne, dropped from a carrier plane before jetting into space, the company fashioned a composite tank about 4 1/2 feet long and 4 feet in diameter to hold liquid nitrous oxide, which was mixed with rubber to power the craft's engines.
"The nitrous oxide tanks are part of the hybrid rocket motor that gives the space ship its push from 48,000 feet to wherever it goes — in this case, greater than 328,000 feet," said Andy Haaland, the company's director of propulsion technology strategy and business development.
"The ground rules were very interesting," Haaland said about Rutan's request for Thiokol help. "They were trying to keep things very secret about what they were doing. So what he did was he kept everybody very departmentalized. The one rule was, 'OK, you are going to work on your problem and your part of the problem. You're going to have to trust Scaled Composites to give you the right engineering requirements and then trust us to do the system integration.' "
Chapman Innovations' first foray into flight was the use of its CarbonX material, made of a blend of carbon-based fibers used for various fire-resistance applications, such as for safety in the motor sports, steelmaking, police and military industries. The SpaceShipOne crew wore CarbonX in suits and gloves designed by Corvo Industries of Palmdale, Calif. CarbonX also was used in the craft to protect the occupants and structure from heat.
CarbonX can withstand temperatures up to 2,000 degrees, can be comfortably worn next to the skin and will not shrink or char when exposed to flame, the company said. The astronauts' suits were a single layer thick.
Happ and Ford said having items in space was a thrill for their companies, each of which has fewer than a dozen employees. Ford said he's unsure of the location of the flight suits used aboard SpaceShipOne but liked the idea of having them at the Smithsonian.
"That," he said, "would be a good place for them, I think."
E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com