How Do You Deliver a 7,000-Pound Spacecraft?
How was NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft packed and shipped from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to Kennedy Space Center in Florida? The mission’s lead engineer Kobie Boykins explains how the team made sure the 7,000-pound spacecraft would be safe while it traveled first on a semitruck then flew to Florida on a United States Air Force C-17 Globemaster III. The Europa Clipper team also shipped enough ground support equipment to fill 14 semitrailers.
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will investigate Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, which — with its subsurface ocean — is one of the most promising places in our solar system to find environments capable of supporting life.
The spacecraft is expected to launch in October 2024 from Kennedy and arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030.
For more information on the mission go to: https://europa.nasa.gov/.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC
Transcript
Kobie Boykins, Europa Clipper Chief Engineer
Have you ever thought about how we take a spacecraft from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and move it to Florida to get launched?
So what you're seeing here is what we call High Bay 1. The engineers, the technicians, the quality assurance members of our team are actually getting our spacecraft ready. The process for preparing the spacecraft is really an art form, a dance. One of the things that we have to think about is how we're going to make our spacecraft fit inside of our shipping container.
We have to figure out what hardware needs to ship with the main spacecraft, and what hardware needs to be taken off, like taking off the high gain antenna. One of the things we need to do is lift the spacecraft from its ground support equipment and move it into the shipping container.
[Engineer] Stop. Okay, perfect.
Our multi-mission container was specially designed to carry spacecraft across the country. That means that the temperature's controlled, the environment’s controlled, how many particles that can be inside are controlled, to make sure that our spacecraft stays clean and safe.
The spacecraft has an amazing journey once we're in the shipping container. It goes from JPL, on a big semitruck, it ends up at March Air Reserve Base.
Once it arrives at March, we unload it and rapidly move it into a C-17 for a flight that will take it to Kennedy Space Center.
So the spacecraft isn't the only thing that we actually pack up and ship across the country. There's all these things that we call ground support equipment, GSE, that need to go with us. Those help us manage the spacecraft.
Ben Marti, Europa Clipper Integration Engineer
We have 12 trucks of ground support equipment, and then we will have two trucks that support the spacecraft move itself. So a grand total of 14 trucks.
Kobie Boykins
Emotionally this is one of the scariest periods of time. It's the first time the spacecraft is going from a very, very, very controlled environment and going into more of an uncontrolled environment where other human beings are around. Behind the scenes are a lot of engineers that are planning out every step of this process.
[Engineer] East, on slow.
Lots of members of our Assembly Test Launch Operations team actually uproot their families and move to Florida for six months.
My emotions for Europa Clipper and the spacecraft leaving is bittersweet. I think it's going to feel like if my kids go off to college. When the spacecraft was here in Southern California, I could come over and visit anytime I wanted to. Now in Florida, it's going to be a little bit more difficult. It's more like getting a phone call every other week.
But it's going to be exciting, too, because now our spacecraft is getting ready to do its final dance and ready to graduate and be on its way to do the science around Europa, this beautiful moon around Jupiter.