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Lansmont trackers monitor NASA’s Artemis rocket
Monitoring the transportation of NASA rocket components may appear to have little in common with the everyday tracking of consumer goods in transit, but many of the same risks and data requirements apply.

In March, Lansmont VP technology Eric Joneson witnessed the emergence of the completed Artemis 1 rocket at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida. Earlier, SAVER data loggers had been used to monitor components and assemblies as they were shipped from their various points of manufacture down to the KSC.
 
“The mechanical design engineers know the fragility associated with all these mission-critical pieces of hardware, so they determined ‘Not-To-Exceed’ dynamic thresholds before any shipment,” Joneson reports. “They then used the loggers to monitor each shipment and record both if and when any of those thresholds were exceeded.”
 
He adds: “They use a Lansmont application called Simple Health Reporting that simplifies the whole process, resulting in a simple ‘go/no-go’ report for their engineers, once the shipments arrive at the KSC.”
 
This is not the first time that Lansmont has worked with NASA. “We became a partner back around 2010, when the space agency selected us as part of what was then the Space Shuttle Program,” says Joneson. “We had to demonstrate stringent quality and reliability capabilities before they would approve our products.” In 2011, the company was named NASA’s Small Business Subcontractor of the Year.
 
As Joneson points out, products shipped by a space agency, consumer goods or biological product company are all sensitive to transport shock and vibration hazards. The quality, integrity and efficacy of all these product types may be compromised if critical thresholds are exceeded.
 
The Artemis Program, which combines a Space Launch System with the Orion Space Capsule, will be used to return man to the moon, and eventually on to Mars.
 
Components shipped separately included booster segments, main fuel tanks, engines, the capsule, and many more, used to create the 350ft (107m) rocket assembly.
 

Published: 03/28/22