Note: The details of this work are confidential. Please contact me for more explicit details on the projects I worked on.
November 2019 – April 2020
Project Scope
I joined Blue Origin as the Engine Assembly & Integration Manufacturing Engineer for the BE-7 Lunar Lander Engine, still in the research phase. At this point in the program, we are still working on subcomponents on the hardware. My contributions involved manufacturing decisions for the Thrust Chamber Assembly and Valve assemblies.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Provide design for manufacturing guidance and tooling engine systems hardware (ancillary lines, ducts, brackets, flanges).
- Determine assembly sequence and write assembly work instructions for the next design iteration of the Thrust Chamber Assembly and the next valve assembly iteration.
- Procure consumables needed for assembly.
- Provide manufacturing guidance to outsource vendors on special processes.
Contributions
Thrust Chamber Assembly:
- Wrote work instructions for subcomponent testing and assembly
- Procured all consumables for build and spare parts for testing
- Performed subcomponent validation testing and troubleshot issues before assembly
- Assembled the next two design iterations of the thrust chamber assembly, one was hot fired (not publicly announced), the second one performed 10s hotfire test.
Valves:
- Determine assembly sequence for valves
- Worked with the valve designer, application engineers, and material engineers to determine manufacturing requirements
- Established manufacturing sources for all parts based on process capabilities
- Procured all consumable items for assembly and testing
Skills Learned
- Orbital Tube Welding (OTW)
- Tube Weld Fixture Design
- Parallel paths for manufacturing
- GD&T, Tolerance Stack-Up Analysis
- Collaborate with Production Control, Quality, Supervisors, Integrated Project Team Leads, Program Managers
- Project management in relation to hardware fabrication to the overall program schedule
- Mapping manufacturing and build flow
- Design release cycle
- Standard assembly practices (torque installation, Krytox application, safety cable installation)
