Patrick Hull, left, and Brent Gaddes, right, receive special commendation awards for their work on critical flight hardware for the Orion spacecraft’s first mission later this fall. Former astronaut John Casper, center, Orion special assistant for program integration, presented the awards.
Brent Gaddes and Patrick Hull – engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Tech alumni – recently were honored for their work on critical flight hardware for the Orion spacecraft’s first mission, Exploration Flight Test-1.
Gaddes and Hull received special commendation awards for work on the spacecraft’s adapter, which connects the Orion craft with a Delta IV rocket, at a celebration event at Marshall. John Casper, Orion special assistant for program integration and a former astronaut, presented the awards.
Hull, mechanical engineering ’99, M.S. ’01, Ph.D. ’04, originally from Oak Ridge, Tenn., served two years as lead designer for both the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Stage Adapter and the Space Launch System Launch Vehicle Spacecraft Adapter. SLS, NASA’s new rocket, will be capable of powering humans and support systems to deep space. It has the greatest capacity of any launch system ever built, minimizing cost and risk. Hull is now components and mechanisms team lead for the Structural and Mechanical Design Branch of the Space Systems Department. In his current role, he works on SLS ground support equipment design and analysis.
Gaddes, mechanical engineering ’87, a native of Brentwood, Tenn., is adapter subsystems manager for the SLS Spacecraft & Payload Integration Office at Marshall. He is responsible for managing the design, development, production and test of the adapters between the various stages of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft.
During Orion’s first trip to space, the spacecraft will travel 3,600 miles above Earth’s surface before re-entering the atmosphere, traveling approximately 20,000 mph at temperatures near 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The uncrewed flight will provide engineers with important data about Orion’s heat shield and other elements, including the adapter’s performance, before it is flown in 2017 as part of the first SLS mission.