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Shuttle Hangar Repurposed for New Spacecraft  Demolition is underway inside one of Kennedy Space Center's old shuttle processing hangars, in preparation for a new spacecraft.
The OPF-3 hangar will serve as a processing facility for Boeing’s seven man capsule. Boeing’s commercial crew program manager John Mulholland, says a team of designers is working on the hardware that will go into the building once the old equipment’s been cleared out. “Right now, through Space Florida they’re doing the demolition of the old shuttle tooling and fixtures that were required to process the orbiter, and in less than a year they’re going to hand the keys over to us.” Mulholland says the number of people working on the project at the Kennedy Space Center will ramp up by over 100 in the next year. The company aims to employ about 550 people on the space coast by late 2016. The CST 100 space craft looks a lot simpler on the outside than the space shuttle- it’s similar to the conical Apollo capsules used to ferry astronauts to the moon in the 1960s. It’s designed to be used just 10 times- unlike the orbiters which were rated for 100 flights. |
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