28 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

For the ﬁrst time in half a century, a giant rocket

built to send humans to other worlds is pointed at the

Florida sky.

The Space Launch System (SLS) perched on the

launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is the

vanguard of the agency’s shift to a new generation of

crewed space travel beyond Earth orbit. Its serene yet power-

ful image stands in contrast to the buzz of activity at the space

center as the Artemis program prepares for its ﬁrst launch.

NASA’s new endeavor is designed to deliver a diverse group

of astronauts to the moon’s surface for the ﬁrst time since the

Apollo program ended 50 years ago.

At the same time, the space agency is passing the torch of

scientiﬁc and commercial missions in earth orbit to private

companies as the International Space Station nears the end of

its life by 2030.

And orchestrating this transition are industrial and systems

engineers providing expertise in logistics, data analysis and

process improvement to decipher history’s most challenging

engineering task: Sending people into space and returning

them home safely.

ISE staff were granted a special media tour of the space cen-

ter and its facilities March 25, one week after the rocket was

rolled to the launch pad and a week before its ﬁrst launch tests

began. Here is an overview and images of the facilities visited.

A return to the

moon and beyond

ISEs are at the forefront as NASA

gears up for Artemis program

By Keith Albertson

Photos by David Brandt and Keith Albertson

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

The Space Launch

System sits at

Launch Pad 39B

March 25 preparing

for its wet dress

rehearsal held a

week later. The

SLS rocket includes

two boosters and

carries the Orion

spacecraft. Artemis

1, an uncrewed

mission designed

to send the Orion

in orbit around the

moon, is scheduled

to launch this year.

NASA’s Artemis program

logo is designed to

symbolize a return to

the moon, with the

“A” representing an

arrowhead from Greek

goddess Artemis, twin

sister of Apollo. The red

trajectory is meant to

symbolize the program’s

ﬁnal destination, Mars.

Courtesy of NASA

May 2022 | ISE Magazine 29

Apollo’s ‘sister mission’ aims

to return humans to the moon

The early days of manned space travel in the U.S. during the

1960s and ’70s sparked worldwide curiosity and excitement,

beginning with the ﬁrst Mercury ﬂights and ending with the

six Apollo moon landings of 1969-72. In recent years, space

travel has consisted mostly of robotic probes to deep space and

earth orbit missions at the International Space Station (ISS).

Now the Artemis mission is designed to follow Apollo’s

lead. Named for the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, the

program is designed to return astronauts to the moon for con-

tinued exploration of the surface. The long-term goal is to es-

tablish a base and sustainable presence on the moon to prepare

for missions to Mars.

Providing the power needed to get there will be the Space

Launch System’s 8.8 million pounds of thrust, the most pow-

erful rocket ever built; by comparison, the titanic Saturn V

rockets used for the Apollo lunar missions provided 7.5 million

pounds.

A test of the SLS system was conducted in April to prac-

tice propellant loading and check the rocket systems, the last

milestone before launch. It included partially loading liquid

oxygen into the core stage tank and conducting a simulated

countdown to test procedures and systems.

Once all the tests are completed, Artemis 1 is scheduled to

launch by midyear to send the uncrewed Orion spacecraft in

orbit around the moon on its ﬁrst ﬂight. Artemis 2, set for ap-

proximately 2024, will include astronauts on a 10-day mission

into lunar orbit. That will be followed by Artemis 3, deliver-

ing astronauts to a landing site near the lunar south pole in

a monthlong mission that will include the ﬁrst woman and

person of color to walk on the moon.

Cargo operations transition

from ISS to private companies

The Space Station Processing Facility includes numerous labo-

ratories, processing space and a large payload loading area. The

three-story, 457,000-square-foot building houses processing

bays, an airlock, operational control rooms, laboratories and

logistics areas.

NASA provides the facilities for private companies to pre-

pare and test their products in low Earth orbit. Items for ex-

“I am super excited about the Artemis program.

It’s embedded in our nature to explore beyond

our boundaries and to explore beyond the

conﬁnes of where we’ve been.”

— Nancy Currie-Gregg, former Space Shuttle astronaut and keynote

speaker at the Applied Ergonomics Conference 2022

The Kennedy Space Center headquarters building opened in 2019.

The spacesuit worn by astronaut Neil Armstrong during his

1969 Apollo 11 moonwalk is seen on display in the Operations

& Checkout Building lobby at Kennedy Space Center

Headquarters.

30 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

A return to the moon and beyond

periments are assembled in “clean” rooms that can include

incubators, freezers and other equipment, including biological

material such as mice or insects used for testing.

Payloads then go to the high bay warehouse area, which

includes eight “footprints” where cargo is loaded into mod-

ules to be sent on commercial ﬂights to the ISS, including

parts needed for the space station’s operations. A low bay area

includes pressurized environments for other materials.

NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, the world’s largest single-

story building at 525 feet tall and 8 acres in size, is where the

rockets and components are assembled. It is so vast inside it

has its own weather; without air conditioning, vapor clouds can

form on the roof during humid weather.

A view from inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building.

“I’ve thought that an assembly line process is a

good analogy for cargo and science experiments.

Going to ISS, you have researchers and

hardware developers from around the world

working on designs. Then they’ll move into

a series of design reviews, prototype designs,

hardware development. That’s what this team

here at Kennedy Space Center does – it hosts

these different teams as they come here for those

ﬁnal steps. We have labs, we have different

kinds of processing space here (Space Station

Processing Facility) that we help them set up.”

— Randy Gordon, cargo integration manager for

Gateway Deep Space Logistics and an industrial engineer

A Sierra Space cargo “hab” module prototype in Kennedy’s

Space Station Processing Facility is one of many in

development by commercial companies to potentially support

NASA’s Artemis missions.

May 2022 | ISE Magazine 31

When the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA

turned to its commercial partners for the vehicles needed to

resupply the ISS. That transition continues as the space sta-

tion, which has been in operation since 2000, is scheduled

to be decommissioned by 2030 and brought out of orbit to

crash safely in the Paciﬁc Ocean. In its 20-year run, the sta-

tion with the wingspan the size of a football ﬁeld orbing 240

miles above Earth has been host to more than 240 astronauts

from 19 countries. When it goes ofﬂine, the experiments

now housed there will be diverted to platforms managed by

private companies.

NASA also is shifting its focus to Gateway, an outpost de-

signed to remain in lunar orbit to store supplies and serve as

short-term crew quarters for the Artemis missions. It is sched-

uled to launch by late 2024 and remain in place as a base orbit-

ing the moon. It was described by Shaun Butts, ﬂeet manager

for Gateway Deep Space Logistics, as “a Motel 6 in space” in a

2021 episode of Problem Solved: The IISE Podcast.

A view inside the high bay area at NASA’s Space Station Processing Facility where material is prepared for launch to the

International Space Station.

“Our commercial partners that build those

parts come in through here and they will

process it and we will get it ready to ﬂy on a

commercial resupply mission. ... And because

it’s right next to the launching facility,

it’s a lot easier for them to do it here and ship

it over for ﬂight than it is to do it in their

manufacturing warehouses.”

— Jessica Langley, NASA International

Space Station operations engineer

“The ISS has been an amazing proving ground

to show the types of problems with low Earth

orbit as far as having humans operating and

living in space and operating a very complicated

system, an outpost in space. Gateway is going

to encounter all of those problems, but we had a

chance to identify them before and try different

solutions to address them. Inevitably, there’s

going to be some other problems we haven’t run

into when we’re trying to deal with an outpost

on the moon. We’re trying to ﬁgure out, how

do systems stay operational? Reliability for

Gateway is paramount.”

— Shaun Butts, ﬂeet manager for

Gateway Deep Space Logistics Services

32 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

A return to the moon and beyond

Gardens in space: Crop lab

grows produce for astronauts

One area in the Space Station Processing Facility is dedicated

to the growing of crops that can be transported and used in

space for astronauts to grow some of their own fresh food.

Earlier this year, the ISS crew enjoyed “space tacos” seasoned

with their own space-grown chili peppers.

The crop lab includes various types of fruits and vegetables

tested for their viability in space with an eye toward efﬁcient

use of water and space. They are cultivated in environmental

growth chambers designed to simulate conditions found on

the space station.

Among the foods grown in the lab are microgreens, which

astronauts can sprinkle on other foods for a boost of nutrients,

plus various types of peppers, tomatoes and even strawberries.

“A lot of times what we do is mimic ISS conditions to cul-

tivate plants,” said Lashelle Spencer, a plant scientist with the

Laboratory Support Services and Operations contract (LAS-

SO) at NASA. “These plants are grown like 3,000 ppm (parts

per million) CO

and we want to evaluate how well they do in

those environments. And they don’t necessarily really always

like it so we use these chambers to simulate that environment.”

The next step is to determine if the plants grown are as safe

for astronauts to eat as those grown in earth soil.

“I think for the most part they really enjoy having fresh,

good, safe produce,” said Mary Hummerick, a LASSO mi-

crobiologist at the lab.

The rocket’s journey from

VAB to pad via the crawler

To get a massive rocket such as the SLS from the cavern-

ous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to the pad requires a

heavy-duty transport vehicle. Enter the crawler-transporter,

a 6.6-million pound behemoth that has carried rockets to the

launch pads since the early 1960s and is the world’s largest

self-propelled land vehicle, according to Guinness. It was up-

graded recently for the task of delivering the Artemis 1 rocket

and spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B in mid-March, a journey

that took roughly 11 hours at less than 1 mile per hour.

Fully loaded with the rocket and mobile launcher support

gantry, the vehicle hauled just shy of 15 million pounds. The

track the crawler travels is covered with a special kind of peb-

Strawberry plants are grown in a controlled environmental

chamber at NASA’s crop laboratory.

“We framed dozens of chili peppers to make

sure that they were compatible with the

environment to which we wanted them to grow.

Did they have good germination? Did they

have the right size? Are they compatible with

LED lights? We did them in these chambers. So

about three years ago, we grew chili peppers, but

right now we’re testing strawberries. So maybe in

three years, we’ll have strawberries.”

— Lashelle Spencer, LASSO plant scientist

“I can tell you that you better be on your game

as far as keeping these (crawler systems) up to

snuff. These have to be in tip top shape. We

want to make sure that our (operation) is kind

of seamless. ... We can’t afford any downtime.

We can’t stop. Before you check something out,

before you take it out, you want to make sure

it’s working properly. Like your vehicle, if you let

it sit for two months, go see what happens to it.

Every two weeks (at a) minimum, we operate

(the vehicle), we move it. Before a launch (haul),

we check all systems. We maneuver, make sure

of our steering, all the systems are activated

and responding correctly. I think that checkout

ahead of time is imperative to verify all of the

subsystems are running perfectly.”

— Stan Shultz, crawler operations engineer and

driver with contractor Jacobs

May 2022 | ISE Magazine 33

bled river rock that the rig crushes into sand as it travels over.

It can transport up to 18 million pounds, roughly the weight

of 20 fully loaded 777 jet airliners.

The crawler is 131 feet long and 114 feet wide, consisting

of four massive treaded truck units carrying a surface area the

size of a baseball diamond designed to hold the rocket and

its support tower. Two 16-cylinder, 2,220-horsepower diesel

engines are fueled by 5,000-gallon tanks; the fuel is burned at

a rate of 125.7 gallons per mile.

The Jacobs Test and Operations Support Contract team that

maintains, operates and drives the crawler collects data dur-

ing the journey from sensors and monitors linked to cameras

located around the vehicle as crew members walk alongside

relaying information to the driver.

Despite the massive scale of the transport operation, the

crawler can maneuver the rocket out of the VAB and dock

at the pad despite tolerances of less than an eighth of an inch

of room to spare, via a laser-guidance system. The 4.2-mile

route includes one 6-degree turn and ends with a 5% grade at

the pad, requiring a hydraulics system to keep the rocket level.

Maintaining a vehicle of such size and complexity requires

constant data analysis and a systems approach, one of the many

ways industrial engineering is key to the next phase of space

travel. 

Keith Albertson is managing editor of ISE magazine. Contact him at

kalbertson@iiseorg.

David Brandt is senior manager of digital strategy and production for

IISE. Contact him at dbrandt@iise.org.

The crawler-transporter has been carrying rockets to the launch pad since the early days of NASA’s space program in the 1960s. It

recently was upgraded to carry the SLS rocket to Launch Pad 39B for its ﬁrst tests, driven by Stan Shultz of Jacobs (middle photo).