The story of heroic fasteners that will get us to the moon and back.
, like an old steam train closing in. Rounding the corner, I see the source of the racket: a table, shaking. The long, metal slab jerks quickly back and forth. On it, in two neat rows, are a half-dozen rectangular prisms packed with sensors measuring pressure and motion. Each one holds a titanium-alloy bolt the size of a grown man’s forearm and weighing about 10 pounds. As the elaborate assemblage might hint, these bolts are special.
EBAD’s components are a bit player in this space epic, but the firm’s mission-critical role gives it an outsize gravitational pull. Of the 5.5 million pounds of rocketry and other equipment that will hurtle Orion out of the atmosphere, only 20,500—less than 0.38 percent—will come back to Earth. “The last thing we want to do is take all the stuff at launch to the moon and back,” explains Carolyn Overmyer, Lockheed’s deputy manager for the Orion crew capsule .
Outside, a morning rain gives way to the bright-green beginning of a fall day. A river, which once powered EBAD’s works, winds through the campus; a family of otters has taken up residence. It’s hard to square the setting with what goes on behind the aged stone walls: space-age bolts getting stretched to their limits.been home to EBAD since well before the Civil War.
NASA doesn’t call these propellants “explosives.” Instead, they’re pyrotechnical systems, or pyro, in which so-called separation bolts are a central part. An electronic switch called an actuator delivers a charge to a threaded incendiary cord that leads to the fastener. The event is over in a fraction of a millisecond—about one-millionth of a blink of a human eye.
Now he and a team of engineers are somewhat obsessed with the trial and error of bolt-making. The end result of their work occasionally winds up in Novotney’s office, in a yellow bucket deep with shards of spent fasteners he likes to show off to visitors. Peering down at this refuse, it looks more like discarded lengths of filled-in pipe than hyperengineered and endlessly tested exploding space stuff.