With the space shuttle CA’s view shifted to vertical, here’s how Endeavor protects against earthquakes

July 20, 2023

— even before it opened more than a decade ago, the exhibit of NASA’s retired space shuttle Endeavor in Los Angeles raised perhaps one question more than any other — could it survive an earthquake?

And to think, it was while showing the winged orbiter near Earth in its horizontal descent configuration.

Now, as the California Science Center takes the first steps to stack the vehicle with a pair of dual solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank for a vertical launchpad-like permanent exhibit inside the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, the question has only grown in order of magnitude.

“Suffice it to say the building and Endeavor will stand when Los Angeles is a pile of rubble,” Dennis Jenkins, project manager for the Endeavor Presentation Science Center and former NASA space shuttle engineer, said in an interview with CollectSPACE.

Plenty of research and technology is behind Jenkins’ answer, providing confidence for him and his team to move forward with the towering display stack.

7383

When Endeavor rolled into its suite at the end of a three-day road trip in October 2012, it was mounted atop four pendulum friction seismic isolators. In the event of a strong earthquake, the shuttle gently glided back and forth, breaking away from the ground.

Since that day, the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Southern California Earthquake Data Center has recorded 7,383 times that the ground shook with enough force that people in the area could feel it. Five of those events were violent enough to cause minor damage. One, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake in 2019, was felt by as many as 30 million people along the state.

“The only one I remember was the biggest,” said Jenkins. “We walked by and looked at the security cameras, and there was no movement [of Endeavour] Or at least, nothing we can perceive.

The same kind of insulator is part of how Endeavor will remain secure in an upright position, though the preparations and complexities involved are greater.

stress test

If you’ve been to the California Science Center to watch Endeavor since it opened, you may have met Bill Novak. He is one of the doctors who helps answer questions from guests as they tour the exhibition.

Novak was also the Shuttle Loading Group Leader at Boeing (and before that, Rockwell).

“He and many of his former colleagues provided a great deal of input on how the vehicle reacts to loads,” Jenkins said, adding that structural engineers for Oschin Air and Space had taken the lead in seismic studies, but had no experience with spaceflight hardware. “Once the two groups developed a common language — structural engineering uses different terminology than aeronautical engineering — things went very smoothly.”

What the two groups of engineers eventually found surprised them both. Where Jenkins’ team initially thought there was an advantage to using replica hardware to integrate or disguise anti-seismic systems, the studies found that what was needed was the real thing—parts that, like Endeavor itself, were built for flight.

“Perhaps the most important finding of the seismic studies was that although they differed significantly from the flight loads, the seismic loads were completely encapsulated by the loads that the space shuttle stack was designed to bear during ascent. This means that we don’t need to make any adjustments to the stack hardware, but it also means that we need to use the flight hardware in all important applications since that’s what we said about the seismic studies.”

In the end, the only essential components the science center couldn’t get from the remnants of the space shuttle program were the two rings that attached the solid rocket booster to the rear outer tank. Instead, they had a local aerospace machinery shop build a kit to original specifications as the flight hardware, so they were basically interchangeable.

Using all of the flight hardware—including the last existing external tank constructed for flight and twin boosters constructed from previously flown parts—the Space Shuttle’s final design loads were about 5 percent greater than the “maximum reliable event.”

“So it’s somewhat higher than the worst trip loads, but it’s still within the vehicle’s ability to survive without permanent damage,” Jenkins said.

circumvent the issue

Today (July 20) everyone should go to plan, the first large components will be lifted from the shuttle stack by crane and lowered into place inside the still-under-construction Oschin Air and Space Center. The two cross-rocket booster rear skirts are the first major parts to be moved, but they are preceded by other hardware that will protect the Endeavor’s vertical width.

The rear skirts are placed atop an 8-foot (2.4 m) thick, 1,800-ton slab of reinforced concrete supported by six triple-pendulum insulators produced by Earthquake Protection Systems, Inc. (EPS), the same company that supplied the insulators for Endeavor’s horizontal show.

“There is a 0.9-meter trench around the floating concrete slab so it can move three feet in any direction,” Jenkins said. “We don’t dampen vertical motion, so whatever vertical motion an earthquake gives us is what we get, but horizontal motion we can move three feet in any direction.”

The stack would then be secured to the slab using the rocket’s eight rigid “anchors” on the rear skirts, the same ones used to secure the shuttle to its mobile launch pad when it was standing about to launch.

Our fastener is a bit different but conceptually identical – a setter bolt with ball bearings and nut on the bottom and a ball bearing and ball nut on top. The two biggest differences are that our set screws are 9 feet (2.7 m) long versus 31 inches (79 cm) long for fly bolts, and our ball nut is not fitted with a Pickens bolt.

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