Something Missing?
Nice picture hereof the first weld on The Vehicle Presently Known As OFT-1.
Note the matte black paint around the windows, a detail we didn’t see on GTA. The panel in view is from sector F, so the hidden panel on the other side would be its (essentially) mirror-image A, making this the weld at the 12:00 position (between the windows). [Correction: no, the welded-to piece is a cone longeron, not the sector-A panel. Derp.] The further away of the two windows is canted inboard to provide forward views for rendezvous and docking.
One curious but annoying (yet common) omission here is any mention that the work isn’t being performed by NASA but by Lockheed Martin. Unless you knew, you would be given the impression by the language here that it was otherwise – “Engineers at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility” being factually correct but completely misleading. We saw the same thing after Katrina, when NASA issued a press release thanking the rideout crew who saved MAF from flooding, never mentioning LM (the facility operator at the time and employer of most of the crew) and carefully phrasing things to imply – without stating it explicitly – that they were all NASA civil servants.
Why do they do that? Strange.
September 14th, 2011 at 11:57 am
They also try to claim credit for inventing friction stir welding. Pathetic.