Giant Step Taken for Space Station : McDonnell Ready to Produce Parts in 5-Story Clean Room

The U.S. space effort entered a new era Tuesday as McDonnell Douglas officials rolled open the doors of a huge new facility for assembling key components of the world’s first orbiting space station.

Completion of the five-story, 22,500-square-foot clean room--the largest dust-free manufacturing facility the company has ever built--”marks the transition” from design to actual production of U.S. components for the international scientific station, said Rodney Linford, the physicist who heads McDonnell Douglas’ space station program.

The space station, which will take five years to complete once construction starts in orbit about 220 miles above Earth late next year, will provide a stable platform for long-term scientific and medical experiments.

Until now, astronauts and scientists have been limited to relatively brief stays in space, orbiting the Earth in small satellite capsules or in space shuttle vehicles.

The first parts are scheduled to be taken into orbit in November 1997 by a Russian crew. The cylindrical module will serve as the space station’s central storage unit.

An American mission will be launched the next month from Cape Canaveral carrying the first of the McDonnell Douglas-built units. The mission will be “a major leap for the space program” said astronaut Robert Cabana, the mission commander. Cabana and three other members of the shuttle crew attended Tuesday’s dedication ceremonies for the facility.

Subsequent missions will add living quarters, scientific labs, power equipment and other units to the station, which will grow steadily over a five-year period until it reaches its scheduled full size--”big enough to fill the entire Rose Bowl,” Linford said.

The station is being funded primarily by the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency.

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McDonnell Douglas has a $2-billion piece of the action as a major subcontractor to Boeing Co. Under a series of contracts awarded several years ago, 1,800 workers, most of them at the company’s Space Systems division in Huntington Beach, have designed and are building the pressurized adapter units that will link the various residential and work modules of the station. McDonnell Douglas also is building the huge bridge-like truss section that forms the backbone of the station and will house the power, hydraulic and water lines and solar panels.

To put together the mostly aluminum components, McDonnell Douglas last April committed $7.6 million to converting a former open manufacturing building into a tightly sealed clean room in which heavy-duty manufacturing operations can be conducted in a nearly dust-free atmosphere. A pair of 20-ton overhead cranes, traversing the length of the building on rails near the ceiling, will be used to move the bulkier components.

A huge filtering system changes the air in the towering building five times an hour--an exchange of 1 million cubic feet of air every 12 minutes.

Workers wearing special protective clothing will enter the room through air locks. Up to 100 employees will be assigned to the room to assemble adapter components and build the five truss sections that will be linked in space to form the 320-foot backbone of the station. It is not a truly sterile environment, but the filtration system keeps air in the cavernous room about as clean and cool as the air in a well-protected computer lab, said Fred Sanchez, head of production operations for the space station program.

The purpose, he said, is to keep dust and production debris from damaging the mirror-like surfaces of the metal components or from fouling delicate electronic assemblies.

“When you are putting something up into orbit and it has to last for years and years without a problem, cleanliness during the manufacturing process is critical,” Sanchez said.