Center ready for NASA project

• By JOE GYAN JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Mar 6, 2008 - Page: 5B

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NEW ORLEANS — The National Center for Advanced Manufacturing — a partnership of the University of New Orleans, the state and NASA — is now certified to support the space agency’s next-generation exploration program, dubbed Constellation.

UNO’s center, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Michoud Assembly Facility in eastern New Orleans, has successfully completed a formal NASA Operation Readiness Review in support of the Constellation program.

Key components of the Constellation program, which aims to send astronauts to explore the moon by 2020, will be built at Michoud. NCAM, a department of the UNO College of Engineering, will play a role in the construction.

Bruce Brailsford, executive director of the NCAM-Louisiana Partnership, said the certification of the center as “operation-ready’’ places UNO among a small and elite group of universities, including Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“This is a monumental achievement,’’ Brailsford said. “The UNO-NCAM center has passed a rigorous NASA review and is now certified to manufacture flight hardware for space travel.’’

The Constellation program is responsible for developing the Ares launch vehicles and Orion crew capsule that will send astronauts back to the moon no later than 2020 and eventually to Mars and beyond.

The center’s manufacturing equipment, such as friction stir welding and advanced fiber placement, will be used in the production of several major pieces for the Constellation program.

Friction stir welding — a solid-state, metal-joining process that produces high-strength, defect-free joints in metallic materials — is a vital requirement of next-generation launch vehicles and hardware that must endure long-term space travel.

The center’s fiber placement machine uses strands of composite fibers to create exceptionally light but strong parts for space vehicles or aircraft.

The operation readiness review of NCAM was conducted by the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Ala. A certificate of completion presented by NASA officials after the review “certifies the NCAM-Louisiana Partnership and the University of New Orleans readiness for operations.’’

Marshall Space Flight Center’s Wendell Colberg, chairman of operation readiness review, said the purpose of the review was for the center to “demonstrate readiness to partner and conduct operations with NASA, NASA contractors and non-NASA entities with the technical and management discipline and rigor that we require from ourselves and our contractors.’’

“We are pleased to present the Certificate of Completion to NCAM in recognition of this successful review,’’ he said.

The National Center for Advanced Manufacturing was created in 1999 for to address NASA’s needs in research and technology development and building the technology base for manufacturing  launch vehicle systems.