Frank Cepollina - Cepollina As An Inventor

Cepollina As An Inventor

It is important to note the dissatisfaction and the problems in the early days of space exploration in order to understand better the improvements made by Cepollina. The amount of engineering and effort required to do work in space were surprising for the engineers in the early days of the manned space program. For instance, the astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Stafford who were launched into space aboard Gemini 9 on June 3, 1966 had to deal with unimagined difficulties as soon as Cernan began a space walk. The plan called for Cernan to take some photographs and enjoy weightlessness for a few minutes before working his way to the rear of the capsule. From the moment he emerged from the capsule, everything Cernan did was much harder than what he expected. He said his space suit felt like a suit of armor, and that every weightless movement triggered an equal, opposite reaction. He found himself repeatedly flying out to the end of the umbilical cord connecting him to the Gemini capsule and then rebounding in an unexpected direction. Medics on the ground were alarmed when his heart rate increased to 155 beats a minute. He perspired enough to fog his helmet visor, and sweat pooled in his eyes . He ripped an insulating layer in the back of his suit, and he instantly felt the fierce, bare sunshine; he returned to Earth with painful burns.

Cepollina marks that "the experiences of NASA's first space walkers pioneered a lot of the technologies we use today." First of all, these initial attempts made clear the need for a change in space-suit design. The Gemini 9 astronauts wore suits inflated to 14 pounds per square inch because that's about normal pressure on earth. NASA cut the level to 4 PSI, reducing the feeling of working inside an overinflated balloon. Furthermore, a new training was developed for moving about in space: practice sessions underwater since moving in a liquid resembles the effects of weightlessness. However, the main challenge was conquering the exhaustion that Cernan had encountered. Cepollina states that their solution was to come up with power tools they could use to limit fatigue, and in order to reduce fatigue, an engineer in Cepollina's team, Paul Richard came up with a pistol-grip device that looks like a battery-powered hand drill on steroids.

In-orbit servicing In his article "In-Orbit Servicing", Cepollina states that in the late 1960s, as inflation and constrained budgets limited the space program, NASA determined three ways of reducing costs: standardized spacecraft components; use of the same spacecraft to do several missions; and use of the Shuttle to extend or renew the useful life of the spacecraft by replacing subsystems and instruments in the orbit.

Why in-orbit servicing? Earth Observing System (EOS), which is a program of NASA comprising a series of artificial satellite missions and scientific instruments in Earth orbit, asked Grumman Aerospace, General Electric and TRW Systems to define the most cost effective mode for using the space shuttle. The companies identified four different methods of “renewing” the defective spacecraft:

• Launch replacement satellites on conventional booster
• Launch replacement satellites by shuttle
• Launch replacement satellites by any of the methods mentioned above and retrieve the defective one for ground refurbishment by Shuttle
• Replace the malfunctioning system of the defective satellite in orbit by Shuttle

When the costs of these four methods were compared, in-orbit servicing was found to be the lowest.

What are the changes that comes with in-orbit servicing? On the other hand, such an approach called for a totally different spacecraft design. In this new concept, each subsystem occupied its own separate drawer or removable module in the spacecraft. For example, all the components having to do with supplying power (the power unit of the space craft) would make up one module so that if something wrong happened with the power unit, that part of the spacecraft was easily taken out and renewed.