Duluth, Minn., Foundry Builds Parts for NASA Shuttle Transporter
Sep. 3–Workers at a Gary-New Duluth foundry are casting parts that will help launch the next generation of American astronauts into space.
On Wednesday, a small delegation from NASA, including two astronauts, visited ME Global to personally thank workers for their efforts on behalf of the space program.
Tim Wieland, president of ME Global, headquartered in Minneapolis, said the Gary-New Duluth foundry made its first delivery of parts to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last week, and is bolstering its staff to handle the additional workload.
In recent months, the foundry has hired more than 20 people, and Wieland expects the company will need between 20 and 30 more to complete the job.
The company has been tapped to fabricate the track shoes for the crawler transporters that NASA uses to carry the space shuttle to its launch pad.
Each of the steel shoes weighs about one ton. Together, they make up the steel treads that propel a massive platform measuring 131 feet long by 114 feet wide. The shoes are held in place by pins that each weigh 100 pounds.
The mammoth machine has four sets of double-tracked treads, each about the size of a Greyhound bus.
NASA has two crawler transporters in its stable. ME Global is supplying a set of shoes for each, plus a set of spares. All told, the foundry expects to produce about 1,100 pieces.
The 6,000 horsepower crawler transporter uses six diesel engines to turn generators that run its 16 electric motors. It travels at a speed of 1/2 to ü mph and gets just one-150th of a mile to the gallon of fuel.
The space shuttle is housed between missions in an assembly building 3 1/2 miles away from its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, and its pre-liftoff journey usually takes a good six hours. The pre-launch space shuttle weighs about 4.5 million pounds.
“What’s really important is that the space shuttle moves with a minimum of vibration,” said James Hartsfield, a NASA spokesman for the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “This machine needs to have a smooth ride, and it does.”
“The half-mile-per-hour trip the space shuttle makes to the launching area is just as critical as the 17,000 mph trip it begins from there,” Hartsfield said, stressing the importance of the work being done by ME Global workers. “The journey into space begins with them.”
Wieland said that even though the shoes are large in size they must conform with NASA’s tight dimensional specifications. He said the vacuum-molding process the Gary-New Duluth foundry uses is well-suited to the job.
“NASA’s quality standards are extremely high,” Hartsfield said. “We have a lot of controls in place to make sure everything we get is exactly what we ordered.
“The space shuttle is the result of a team effort on the part of the entire country,” Hartsfield said. “Parts of it are built in the most surprising places you could imagine, and the work that these people do together is something we should all be proud of.” Wieland doesn’t expect to fulfill NASA’s order in its entirety until sometime in January. He declined to disclose the contract’s value.
Even after the NASA job is finished, Wieland expects to retain the services of ME Global’s new hires in Gary-New Duluth. His optimism is based on recent strong demand for mining equipment the company makes.
“We’re heavily dependent on the taconite industry, and as you know, it’s been running extremely strong lately,” he said. ME Global also serves copper, molybdenum and gold operations that have thrived lately, Wieland said.
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