HOW ROCKETS ARE MADE (Rocket Factory Tour – United Launch Alliance) – Smarter Every Day 231

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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Five… Four… Three… Two… One… Hey, it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day! I love rockets! If you’ve been around this channel, you know that about me, and today is like the best day ever because we’re going to learn how to build rockets.

Just down the road from Huntsville, Alabama, there’s a city named Decatur. In that city, there is a rocket factory owned by a company called United Launch Alliance (ULA), and that factory has been producing incredibly reliable rockets for years. Because these orbital rockets have some of the same technologies as ballistic missiles, the knowledge about how to build them is protected. In the United States, we have a set of regulations called ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations). Because of ITAR, nobody’s going to let you walk into a rocket plant with a camera and film things. They can’t risk that information getting out and breaking the law. So there has to be an incredible amount of trust between the parties that want to film things and the people that own the plant.

Thankfully, I was given the opportunity to build that trust with ULA when I went and watched the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, and I met the CEO of ULA on the launchpad. If you haven’t heard of Tory Bruno, then you’re in for a treat. He’s a legitimate rocket scientist who knows his stuff inside and out. It was at this launch that Tory and I built trust with each other. The tour we’re about to go on has never been done on the internet; Tory literally takes us right up to the line of what he can show us, and all along the way, he’s answering my technical questions and letting me explore the factory.

So here we go, let’s take the first-ever online tour of the United Launch Alliance rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama, with the CEO of ULA, Tory Bruno.

Okay, we’ve got Tory mic’d up now.

– Hi! And you’re going to show me the rockets that are…
– Yes, fabricated at this facility? What do we have?

Okay, so we’ve got an Atlas V on the side; this is kind of our workhorse, and it’s in the five-meter payload fairing configuration. It also has its SRBs on the side, which is sort of its maximum lift version. When it’s got all five of those, we call it “the beast.”

– And this is the Delta IV Heavy, and this is what you–thank you again for letting me…
– Yeah, of course, participate, or at least see the Parker Solar Probe.
– Yeah, that was fun, huh?
– And that’s fabricated here in Decatur?
– Yes, yeah, so three-core rocket, literally three rockets kind of bolted together, and it is our largest rocket; it’s physically the largest rocket in the world right now, and it is what we used for Parker Solar Probe.

– And this is what I want to talk about…
– Yeaaaaah, this is Vulcan, and this rocket has never flown.
– Never flown, not yet. And you’re going to see the first flight vehicle hardware in the factory being fabricated when we go in there today.
– Today?
– Yeah!
– Okay!

– So this is our brand new rocket; you can think of it as kind of a derivative of those two in a way, so it’ll be large, 5.4-meter diameter, a little bit bigger than Delta, it can take six SRBs, and it has a huge cavernous payload volume for the spacecraft. This rocket has 30% more lift capability than this big three-core monster.
– So when you say six SRBs…
– Six of them, yeah.
– And that’s just to get out of the Earth’s gravity well?
– Yes, right, exactly.

– Can we go see the stuff?
– Yeah, let’s go see it. Okay, we’re at a rocket factory, let’s do it.

– We’re going to peel off to the right here.
– Okay.

Okay, I’m seeing the grid here. Yeah, so this is a barrel section from the booster over your head, actually from an Atlas. I’m going to walk you down to the end of the factory where this first gets made; it’s the first thing we do. Raw stock comes in the back door, gets machined, puts this curve in it, and then we’ll walk you all the way through to a completed version.

– That’s awesome!

Okay, so there’s something unique about the north Alabama area here. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a little triangle: there’s a nuclear power station, there’s a steel mill, and there’s also a rocket factory like in a triangle.
– That’s true.
– And then you got a river running between them.
– Yup, and so you can bring in steel, you can make a rocket using the power from the nuclear plant.
– Yes, is that why you’re here?
– That’s part of why we’re here, but it’s also because of the talent that we have here with the University of Alabama and the other Alabama universities and the technician programs they have here; you just get an awesome workforce. And with the river, which is only a mile from here down Red Hat Road, we have the dock for our rocket ship, so we can transport our rockets out to the launchpad.

This is the rocket ship Tory’s talking about; you see? It says so right on the side: “Rocketship.” The rocket ship navigates its way through several rivers up to the Mississippi River, down to the Gulf of Mexico, and then it heads to whatever pad the rockets will launch from.

– You should come back sometime and do the ship.
– Yeah, I should ride on the ship. Is that a thing?
– Yeah, can you do that?
– Yes, that is a thing!

Okay, we’re getting on a golf cart, and we have to cut cameras because we’re going to pass, uh, not “secret stuff,” but things we can’t film. Right?
– Right.

Okay, cutting the camera off.

Ok, we’re on the golf cart, and I’ve obtained permission to film straight up so you can’t see “that,” which is pretty neat.

Ok, so, I can’t talk about that right now, can I?
– No, we can’t show it to you, but I can tell you what it is. That’s a Delta payload fairing, so one of the smaller versions of the Delta’s payload fairing, and then you’re passing by a heat shield here that would protect the RS-68 engine from its own plume during flight.

Ok… this is almost emotional. I mean, you know what it’s like to sit in class and study this stuff.
– Oh yeah, sure.
– And then… cause you went to Cal Poly, right?
– Right.
– Yeah, so this is me looking at all the stuff I’ve learned about and finally getting to see it. It’s one thing to see it on the pad, but it’s almost like a holy experience.
– Yeah, well, you’re inside where it’s actually happening, where it all gets put together.

Okay, I’m starting to get the smell of the machine shop, the manufacturing, the cooling oil.
– Yep, smell.
– You got it.

It’s my understanding you’re about to show me how to build a rocket from scratch.
– Yes, I am.
– Okay, excellent, so we’re going to the door, right?
– Yes, we are.

Okay, this is what I wanted to see here at ULA: This is the door. I can’t even get–it’s a wide-angle lens–so that’s the door where the material comes in, right?
– Right. That’s where the raw aluminum plate and other materials come in, and then this is the receiving area, and as they move that way, it turns into a rocket. So we’re about to build a rocket by going that way in the plant.
– Exactly.

– Okay, I’m game, let’s do this.
– Alright, let’s do it.

And this is an active manufacturing facility, so you’re just going to have to deal with the audio; there’s a lot of tools running.
– Yeah, sorry about that, but, you know, building rockets. It’s good.

Oh wow, that is… that is really–can I go touch that?
– Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is a very, very expensive piece–is that aluminum or stainless?
– That’s aluminum.
– Aluminum, yeah. And is that fabricated here locally?
– That’s imported?

No, yeah, we buy that from a supplier and then it’s shipped here, comes in through the big door, if you will–and then we machine it down. We’re going to remove more than two-thirds of the material while retaining about ninety percent of the strength—in certain dimensions, right? And I will show you that, yeah.
– Okay, got it.

So this is our raw material, and we’re going to go make a rocket.
– Okay.

And so, all this is aluminum?
– That is a–
– All this is aluminum.

That’s a unique dimension; you normally don’t see plates of aluminum that wide and that long.
– No, so this is actually made especially for us in these dimensions, so that we can turn them into the barrel; the propellant tanks of the rocket itself.
– Okay, so you’re tooling up an entire foundry of some type or a mill, a rolling mill.
– A rolling mill.

Okay, gotcha. So I’m going to show you a couple of different things before we get to the machine, so starting here with the raw stock of 7000-series aluminum, it’ll eventually become a round rocket barrel. This is just after machining, and I wanted to point this out to you because this is our old style of grid that we machine in called an isogrid, and you’re familiar with what an isogrid is?
– Isogrid, yes.
– Right? So we have isentropic properties when we do the stress analysis, and you can see the triangular patterns in there. That’s not actually the ideal pattern for a rocket barrel, but it is what the analytical tools—the finite element analysis tools available to us when we designed the Atlas and Delta in the nineties—were available to us, and that’s why we have that pattern. Vulcan will be better because the tools are better, and you’ll see the difference when we walk down the line.
– I have never thought about that.

So literally because in the nineties the FEA analysis could solve a triangle easily, that’s why the isogrid is a triangle.
– Exactly.
– I would’ve never thought that.

So basically, if I understand correctly, you—can I touch this?
– Yeah, touch if you want.
– I’m going to ask you that every time.
– Yeah, that’s alright.

So basically because you can compute the force coming in one member to a node and the forces coming out the other member, that’s how you arrived at isogrid.
– Exactly.

– Okay, fantastic. What’s your safety factor on flying here?
– Oh, so it depends on what part of the rocket we’re talking about; anything that would be pressurized when people are around has a higher safety factor than what is not, but the factors we work with in flight are anywhere from 1.1 to never really higher than 1.25.
– Got it, yes. I mean it’s very different than like designing a railroad car where your factor of safety might be 7 or 8.
– Oh no, yeah.

And a factor of safety is, if you can compute the stress that the thing will break at, you design it to 1.1 times that.
– Right, 10% more load-carrying capability, and really a factor of safety is really a factor of ignorance. You have a factor of safety because you’re not truly sure what might happen to it in the field, so you give yourself just a little bit more.

And you talked about rail; big tractors are another one; we have big factors of safety like 7 times, 12 times. When we do rockets, we like to keep it closer to like just 10%, maybe 20%, because we can’t afford the weight.
– Got it, because every thousandth of an inch that you put in this webbing here, over the course of a huge part like this, you’re talking tons on the whole rocket.
– Yes.

– Okay, exactly, and this is a booster plate, and so every seven pounds of that costs me a pound of spacecraft.
– So how long does it take to machine that? You have the tools here to machine this isogrid?
– Yeah, this is about a two-day operation altogether.

Is this curled like a potato chip in this direction, or in this direction?
– In the long direction.
– And you’re going to see that operation as we walk to the other end.
– Nice.

That’s what the twenty-five-ton brake presses are for.
– Yeah, because if you’re curling along the long direction, you require a tremendous amount of force, and you have to have alignment to keep it straight during the bend.
– Exactly.

– Okay, is that a pressure vessel? I mean, would that hold pressure or would there be a liner on the inside?
– It is a pressure vessel, but actually on the booster because it’s liquid propellant, most of the pressure is at the bottom just coming from hydraulic head. We only have a few PSI of gas on top to keep the propellant down against the outlet feeding it into the engine.
– Got it.

This is not something I expected to see. These guys are—they appear to be putting—are they washing? What are they doing?
– They are. So the first thing that happens to those big plates is we plane them—we make them flat—and so these guys are going over an operation that’s just been done; they’re cleaning it up, they’re looking for any imperfections, and what you’re going to see in the factory that I think is really cool; you know we’re building rockets, we’re at the pinnacle of technology, and you’re going to see high-tech robotic operations, but mixed in you’re going to also see craftsmanship, with people who are very skilled and have great attention to detail like these guys. They’re going to go over every inch of that thing and make sure that the automated machine that planed it didn’t leave any features we don’t want. So if like a piece of the tool broke or something like that…
– Exactly, shattered, whatever.

– Yeah, so, are these your fly-cutters here?
– Yeah, basically end mills; some of them are side mills, but yes.
– Gotcha, am I allowed to look at this fly cutter?
– Yeah, yeah, go ahead, sure.
– Wow! Isn’t that cool? I love machining; it’s a secret passion of mine.
– Yeah, me too.

So you went to Alabama, right?
– I did.
– So do you guys do a lot of sort of machine shop time in your engineering degree?
– Not a whole lot, but we do take a class or two; for my undergrad, I did that. But my dad had an old lathe and mill in the garage when I was growing up.
– Cool!

Yeah, that’s cool stuff. The other thing I’ll share with you, you can see all that flow down there, we actually recover all these chips, so even though we’re going to take the majority of the material away by machining it off—subtractive manufacturing—we capture all of it, we send it right back to the supplier and it comes back to us in a plate a month later.
– That’s awesome!

That, is that coolant?
– That’s coolant, but it’s mostly water.
– Mostly water, so it’s capturing the chips.
– That’s a tremendous amount of water flow!
– Yeah, well, chips are heavy. [Both chuckle]

It’s hard to get a scale for that. It’s hard to get a scale for that, but that is a lot of fluid. Oh, there’s a whole river of coolant there.
– Oh yeah, you can see it.

Are you looking for places where the tooling broke?
– No, we’re looking for chips or debris that might be on it; we only have about a 5000th of a thickness.
– Right, so a small chip would be outside of the tolerance zones.
– Right.

Thank you very much, my name’s Destin.
– Jeff.
– Nice to meet you, Jeff.
– Nice to meet you.

That’s cool; the human story is what’s really cool to me, that’s amazing.
– Me too.

Here’s one that, uh, I think this guy’s actually running. So you can see way down there where the cutting head is. These are actually the plates for Vulcan flight two.
– Really?
– The second Vulcan that’ll go. So you know what we ought to do is we ought to, like, steal you a chip down there, so you’ll have a chip from the Vulcan rocket when it goes to space.
– Can I, can I stick one in my pocket?
– Yeah.
– Ok, I’m gonna—

It’s a little sharp, be careful.
– I’ll be careful, I’ll take a little one.

Nothing to see here.
– It’s okay, you be careful. A chip from Vulcan, here’s your chip. Guard it with your life.

– Alright, we’re in trouble but don’t tell anybody.
– We’re in trouble but don’t tell anybody, Tory Bruno said it was okay if I stuck a chip in my pocket.

So, these machines are CNC, correct?
– Yes.
– Okay, and are these specially made machines, or because usually you don’t plane a surface that wide?
– They were, yeah.

No, generally when you’re in this kind of factory you’re going to see tooling that comes from big tooling manufacturers, but it has been designed especially for this application.
– Really?
– So for example, the head here is probably normal, but the ways on the machine, this is incredibly long for a mill.
– Yes, exactly, very very long, and very large.
– Gotcha.

Very, you know, big width. That lets us do more than one plate at a time.
– So if one of these machines goes down, what does that do to you?
– That would be a big impact, but fortunately we have more than one, so we would always still have the other machines running. And so what would happen is we’d get it fixed and then we would catch up on an off-shift.
– Because I’ve kept up with your launch record, and you always meet schedule, is it because you have redundancy built into this part of the process?
– That is part of it. So yes, this factory was actually built with the idea in mind of building as many as forty rockets a year, and so we have so much capacity, it’s easy for us to kind of make up for little challenges like that along the way, because nowadays you fly maybe twelve or fifteen times a year tops.
– Right, okay. So you’re not at capacity.
– No, not even close.
– But you want to be; this is a commercial for that.
– Yes, we do, yeah we do.

Okay, so that moment right there where Tory Bruno is joking about the capacity of his rocket plant; it reminds me of a very specific moment in an audiobook I love called “Seveneves.” Now the beautiful thing about Smarter Every Day being sponsored by Audible