The Experiment That Wouldn’t Die : Device for Making Ball Bearings Will Be Put to the Test Aboard Shuttle

Getting a student-designed science experiment into space is almost as difficult as making a perfect metal sphere.

But later this month, four former Cal State Northridge students hope to accomplish both.

After almost seven years of false starts and bureaucratic delays, their experimental device for making a flawless ball bearing in space has been loaded aboard the space shuttle Columbia, which is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Wednesday morning.

“I wasn’t really feeling it until a couple of days ago and then it hit me that we were really going this time,” said Jeff Craddock, 36, of Thousand Oaks, payload manager and head of the group that designed and built the 60-pound experiment. He and the other three members of the team will travel to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch.

“It has been so much work and there have been so many delays over the years that I guess I didn’t want to get my hopes up again. But now that it is so close I am getting really excited.”

The experiment began in 1984 as a project by 12 CSUN engineering students, who have long since graduated and gone on to other careers. But a nucleus of four graduates, who kept the project going, hope that they will finally see their device go into space.

It was designed to take advantage of NASA’s Get Away Special program that allowed educational, commercial and governmental scientific experiments to hitch a ride in the payload bay of shuttle flights.

“We are just a carrier system for experiments,” said Lawrence Thomas, the technical liaison officer for the program. “The groups don’t even have to give us feedback unless they choose to.”

The CSUN group devised a self-contained, battery-powered unit to melt small cubes of metal alloy suspended in wax. Theoretically, in the zero gravity of space the metal should form perfect spheres, which are impossible to create on Earth because gravity inevitably deforms the metal. A perfect sphere would be a better ball bearing--key components of machines from autos to aircraft.

If the experiment succeeds, it could stimulate interest in establishing bearing factories on space stations, Craddock said.

“That would make it more efficient,” said Craddock, who now works as a design engineer for Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne division in Canoga Park. “But the most exciting part of the experiment would be to see if we can make a sphere that is hollow.”

A hollow sphere is theoretically better because the mass in the center of a bearing increases its weight but does not add commensurately to its strength. Making hollow bearings strong enough to survive great stress has not been achieved on gravity-bound Earth.

The group originally hoped the experiment would fly as soon as 1985, but competition for Get Away space was fierce, and NASA required rigorous safety tests on payloads before accepting them.

Then the Get Away Special program came to a halt in 1986 after the shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff.

In the meantime the members of the group had graduated and those who kept the faith on the project dwindled to four--Craddock, Walter Waring, Joan Yazejian and Henry Loureiro. They continued to meet occasionally to refine the experiment.

They were given free use of an environmental chamber at National Technical Services in Saugus to test for the temperature extremes that their apparatus might encounter in space. “We chilled the whole payload down to minus 115 degrees Fahrenheit and it failed,” Craddock said. “So we had time to change the insulation and fix it.”

The group also raised the money needed for the project, which grew to $8,000 over the years. Most of it came out of their own pockets, but they received a $3,000 gift, no strings attached, from a local ball bearing manufacturer, Industrial Tectonics. That paid NASA’s fee to carry the payload into space.

They learned last year that the payload would finally go on shuttle flight No. 40, the first since Challenger to accept Get Away payloads. But again, there were delays because Columbia developed fuel leaks and structural cracks.

The team traveled to Cape Canaveral in March to oversee the final testing of their unit and its packing into a payload canister. But because of increased security stemming from the Gulf War, they were not allowed near the shuttle.

They will not see their experiment again until about three weeks after the Columbia lands. By then the shuttle will have been flown back to Florida, where Craddock will collect the precious cargo.

He said he will have to resist the urge to open it right away. That will have to wait until he gets home and it can be opened under special conditions, immersing the wax in solvent to remove the balls without scarring them.

However, the experiment’s ride back to Los Angeles will not be as cargo. It will be on Craddock’s lap. “I don’t think I will let it out of my hot little hands all the way home,” Craddock said.