The design and fabrication of the Centaur neutral buoyancy trainer and related hardware

Two full scale mockups of the Centaur upper stage were designed, fabricated and delivered to NASA. One was the Centaur Weightless Environment Training Facility (WETF) trainer and the other was the Centaur 1-G mockup. The Centaur upper stage booster is designed to carry the spacecraft Galileo to Jupiter, and the spacecraft Ulysses to an orbit around the Sun after launch from the Space Shuttle. The flight vehicle has several Extravehicular Activity (EVA) contingency tasks that require crew training. This need for crew training generated the requirement for the Centaur WETF crew trainer, which is high fidelity in areas of expected crew interface. During the production of the Centaur WETF crew trainer, the need for a jumper cable from Centaur to the Orbiter was identified. This EVA contingency task would be the installation of a cable from the Orbiter cargo bay sill to various command data boxes on Centaur to allow crew control deployment should a failure occur. This task required the upgrading of volumetric boxes on the trainer to a high fidelity configuration including electrical connector installation and cable routing.