CSUN Project Finally Getting Slot on Shuttle : Persistence: Four aerospace engineers are hurrying to finish an experiment they began as students. The test, delayed by the Challenger explosion, is scheduled for a mid-August launch.

A group of Cal State Northridge engineering graduates working part time in the garage of a West Hills home are scrambling to put the finishing touches on an experiment that after four years has been accepted for passage aboard a space shuttle flight this summer.

The former CSUN students, who work as engineers in the aerospace industry, on Friday accepted NASA’s offer to carry their 60-pound experiment aboard the space shuttle’s flight 40, scheduled for launch in mid-August.

But the 1984 CSUN graduates say they have little time to celebrate the long-awaited news. They plan on spending all of their spare hours trying to complete modifications to their experiment in time to ship the project to Cape Canaveral by the April deadline.

“We’ve already been working a lot of nights to get this into shape by the deadline,” said Jeff Craddock, 35, who spent Sunday with his colleagues testing, rewiring and resoldering parts on the project.

If all goes according to schedule, the group would be the first from a California public school to get its experiment aboard the shuttle, part of the “getaway specials” that NASA offers to schools, businesses and other government agencies.

Work on the experiment was moved last week from a CSUN laboratory to the garage of Henry Loureiro, 28, who suggested the idea for a senior project at the Northridge campus. The group has dwindled from a dozen students to four since work on the experiment started in the spring semester of 1984, when the group applied to NASA.

The other two former students are Joan Yazejian of La Canada and Walter Waring of West Hills.

Their experiment is supposed to show whether it is possible to manufacture perfectly round, hollow ball bearings in the zero gravity of space. Such bearings would outperform by as much as 40% the ball bearings made on Earth, which have slight imperfections caused by gravity and the manufacturing process, Craddock said.

In an earlier NASA experiment, latex was melted in space into a perfectly round, tiny ball smaller than a pinhead. But so far, the experiment has never been tried with a metal.

“One physicist says it will never work and another says it will,” Craddock said. “We’re going to find out.”

Craddock and his friends had feared they would never get the chance after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January, 1986. But even before the space shuttle program resumed, NASA notified the group that they were in contention for a slot on a future flight.

For more than a year, the group has worked on modifications, mostly for safety, ordered by NASA engineers. For example, all of the wiring had to be changed to a special Teflon-insulated wire, a long and tedious job. Other changes prompted much paper work and correspondence, group members said.

Shortly before Christmas, Yazejian received a government telegram naming the CSUN Aerospace Group as one of a dozen experiments accepted for the August launch. But the group was surprised by the April deadline.

“We thought we would have until the end of July,” Craddock said.

Finally on Friday, the last day to accept NASA’s offer, the group notified the government space agency that they would be ready by April.

“Engineering projects always take 110% of the amount of time budgeted,” Craddock said. “Plus everything is reviewed and re-reviewed by NASA. At every review, somebody found something they wanted changed.”

Batteries will take up most of the 2.5 cubic feet of room on the space shuttle allotted to the ball bearing experiment. The batteries will heat about 30 pieces of an alloy, each about the size and shape of a pencil eraser tip, to their melting point of a little more than 200 degrees. A small fan will cool the pieces to harden them in their new shape.

The experiment takes about eight hours and will be fully automatic once one of the astronauts pushes a button, Craddock said. So far, the experiment has cost about $6,000, about half of that for the flight and half for materials. Most of the money has been donated, he said.

Three members of the group talked Sunday with the easy camaraderie of those who have spent years working together. And as they consider the completion of their experiment, the last tie with their days as students, they spoke with some nostalgia as well.