A historic flight is expected to launch on May 30th, 2020 with SpaceX and NASA teaming up as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be launching from United States soil in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for a trip to the International Space Station.
The two veteran astronauts have been training for the flight for over two years. In addition, critical testing protocols have been implemented for verification and validation, all to ensure safety and success.
Materials used in aerospace structures include metal alloys, polymers, composites, and more. Mechanical testing, including tension, flexion, fatigue, and hardness testing, is performed on aerospace materials and final products to determine properties such as the breaking strength, elongation, ductility, fracture toughness, and fatigue life cycle.
- Breaking strength refers to the maximum strength a material can withstand prior to rupture or failure.
- Elongation is the amount of extension produced when the specimen is stretched in tension.
- Ductility is defined as the ability of a material to deform plastically in tension or shear before fracture.
- Fracture toughness is the amount of stress required to propagate a preexisting flaw.
- Fatigue properties such as the fatigue life cycle, or the number of loading cycles of that a specimen can sustain before failure, are also thoroughly analyzed in aerospace as these materials need to sustain damage from numerous factors such as creep, wear, and corrosion over extended periods of time in different environmental conditions.
Often applications and test methods in the aerospace sector are governed by strict standards and require accreditation. ADMET offers versatile standard designs and custom machines equipped with advanced software and accessories like environmental chambers to run aerospace testing while ensuring repeatability and reproducibility of tests. Read our informative blog post on Aerospace Testing Equipment for more information here.
Visit NASA or SpaceX for up-to-date information on the historic launch.
