Product Assurance for Spaceflight Hardware

This report contains information about the tasks I have completed and the valuable experience I have gained at NASA. The report is divided into two different sections followed by a program summary sheet. The first section describes the two reports I have completed for the Office of Mission Assurance (OMA). I describe the approach and the resources and facilities used to complete each report. The second section describes my experience working in the Receipt Inspection/Quality Assurance Lab (RI/QA). The first report described is a Product Assurance Plan for the Gas Permeable Polymer Materials (GPPM) mission. The purpose of the Product Assurance Plan is to define the various requirements which are to be met through completion of the GPPM mission. The GPPM experiment is a space payload which will be flown in the shuttle's SPACEHAB module. The experiment will use microgravity to enable production of complex polymeric gas permeable materials. The second report described in the first section is a Fracture Analysis for the Mir Environmental Effects Payload (MEEP). The Fracture Analysis report is a summary of the fracture control classifications for all structural elements of the MEEP. The MEEP hardware consists of four experiment carriers, each of which contains an experiment container holding a passive experiment. The MEEP hardware will be attached to the cargo bay of the space shuttle. It will be transferred by Extravehicular Activity and mounted on the Mir space station. The second section of this report describes my experiences in the RVQA lab. I listed the different equipment I used at the lab and their functions. I described the extensive inspection process that must be completed for spaceflight hardware. Included, at the end of this section, are pictures of most of the equipment used in the lab. There is a summary sheet located at the end of this report. It briefly describes the valuable experience I have gained at NASA this summer and what I will be able to take with me as I return to college. I briefly discuss the experiences I mentioned in the previous three paragraphs along with training classes I attended and courses I completed at the Learning Lab.