Jun 3 1985
From The Space Library
A fire of unknown cause today destroyed one of the four buildings used to mix rocket solid fuels for the Space Shuttle at Morton Thiokol's rocket motor assembly plant outside Brigham City, Utah, the Washington Post reported. No one was injured in the fire that leveled a 400-sq.-ft. building operated largely by robots at a remote part of the Thiokol plant.
Because three of the four fuel mixing plants at Thiokol were needed at all times to maintain solid-fuel rocket motor production schedules, NASA said it was concerned enough to send an accident review board team from Marshall Space Flight Center to investigate. (W Post, June 5/85, A5)
Lewis Research Center (LeRC) announced it awarded Honeywell Inc., Avionics Division, a $14,900,000 contract for fabrication and delivery of three flight inertial measurement groups (IMG) for the Shuttle/Centaur guidance and navigation system, which maintained a fixed reference orientation for and measured acceleration of the Centaur.
Work under the sole-source firm-fixed-price contract would begin in May 1985 at the contractor's plant in Clearwater, Florida.
NASA was modifying the Centaur, which had launched domestic and military communications satellites and sent spacecraft to investigate planetary systems, to fit into the Space Shuttle. NASA would first use the Shuttle Centaur combination to launch the Galileo and then the Ulysses missions. (LeRC Release 85-40)
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