June Malone
Marshall Space Flight Center, Ala.
(Phone: 205/544-7061)
june.malone@msfc.nasa.gov

Release No.: 95-054

ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY MATERIAL TO INSULATE NASA’S SPACE SHUTTLE SOLID ROCKET BOOSTERS

The Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) used to launch the Space Shuttle soon will be coated with a more environmentally friendly insulation. Developed and tested by engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and United Space Boosters Incorporated (USBI), also in Huntsville, the new insulation will see its first flight on a Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster in early 1996.

The new material, called MCC-1 for Marshall Convergent Coating, is a sprayable thermal protection system that will be used to protect the large areas of the SRB structures, with the exception of the motor segments, from heating due to aeroshear, radiation and plume impingement.

"The new material represents a significant advancement in our efforts to eliminated the use of volatile organic compounds in SRB processing," said SRB Deputy Project Manager John Chapman. "Using this new material at our SRB assembly facility in Florida will improve air quality and simplify processing. It is clearly a ‘win-win’ development."

The material uses a new technology which eliminates the hazardous solvents used by the current SRB insulation, Marshall Sprayable Ablative-2. The new insulation is applied to the booster components through a convergent process in which the materials are mixed outside the spray nozzle as they converge onto the surface. In addition to the positive environmental aspects of the materials, the new insulation is easier to process in that it has fewer constituent materials and batch processing is eliminated because of the "on demand" spray system.