McDermott International, Inc. has been awarded a contract by Precision Mechanical, Inc. for a double wall liquid hydrogen sphere at the John F. Kennedy Space Centre, Florida.
Using its Hortonsphere® pressure sphere vessel design, McDermott will engineer, procure, fabricate and construct the 1,400,00-gallon cryogenic double wall sphere. The sphere will be the largest ever built for NASA.
“McDermott’s CB&I Storage Tank Solutions has more than a century of experience delivering innovative and complex storage solutions,” said Richard Heo, McDermott’s Senior Vice-President for North, Central and South America.
“This liquid hydrogen sphere will be utilised for NASA’s new Space Launch System/Orion programme – a space frontier programme focused on missions to Mars,” Heo continued.
The outer sphere has a diameter of 83 feet and an internal sphere of 71.6 feet – making the new sphere 50% larger than any sphere that has support NASA’s space shuttle programme over the past 30 years.
Once completed, the sphere will provide NASA with the combined site capabilities to store and process over two million gallons of liquid hydrogen for launch support.
