Bend company to help analyze Columbia tiles

Published 4:00 am Wednesday, February 5, 2003

Company officials who contract with NASA might expect business to slow down following the space shuttle Columbia tragedy.

But Bob Chaney believes his will intensify.

Chaney’s Bend-based company, Service Physics Inc., specializes in ”failure analysis,” he said Tuesday afternoon.

For 11 years, he and his staff have maintained equipment for NASA. He helped develop and build the equipment while working at a Mountain View, Calif., company called Surface Science Laboratories Inc. The equipment conducts chemical analyses on materials such as the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles.

The tiles protect the craft as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere and have become a major focus of concern following Saturday’s tragedy.

Chaney, in an interview, said he hopes the Columbia tragedy will spur a major funding increase for NASA.

”The program has gone a surprisingly long time without having many problems,” he said. ”It needs better equipment. Most of the technology they’re using is over 30 years old. There’s a lot that could be done to make things safer and work better.”

Although Chaney’s work with the space program comprises only about 10 percent of Service Physics’ total business, he believes his company’s equipment ”will be heavily used to analyze” the structural integrity of Columbia’s tiles during its last mission.

NASA laboratories have used his machines in the past to help solve space-hardware problems, such as with the Hubble Space Telescope, he said.

Chaney’s firm provides customer service and software upgrades for electron spectroscopes that examine the first 10 atomic layers on a material’s surface. That is the only area involved when things ”stick together,” he said.

With those instruments, NASA investigators could look at the chemical structure of the tiles’ bonding, he said.

Shuttle tiles are made of silica, according to Dian Hardison, an engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s east coast.

NASA uses Chaney’s equipment at three of its locations – the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., he said.

Service Physics maintains the equipment, in part, by providing NASA with software upgrades, he said. Another local company, Redmond’s PCC Schlosser, makes titanium castings for Lockheed Martin Space Systems’ NASA contractor in New Orleans.

It is not yet known how the shuttle disaster will affect the company’s contract with the space program, said Dwight Webber, spokesman for Portland-based Precision Castparts Corp., PCC Schlosser’s parent company.

”That remains to be seen at this point,” he said. ”Obviously, it’s a larger question than suppliers can answer.”

The nation’s space agency halted all shuttle missions following Saturday’s tragedy. How long the shuttle program will remain grounded is unknown.

Marion LaNasa, Lockheed’s spokesman in New Orleans, declined to comment, saying the company is not releasing any information on its suppliers while the shuttle disaster investigation continues.

”Because NASA is conducting an investigation, they don’t want a lot of side talk with suppliers,” Webber said. ”The main focal point is on the investigation.”

Thomas Teramura, Schlosser’s general manager, would not say how long the company has been working with the space program, referring all inquiries to Lockheed.

Precision Castparts Corp., a publicly traded company, earns about 10 percent of its total business through its contracts with the space program, Webber said.

Other firms with regional offices that either currently work, or have worked, with NASA but couldn’t be reached for comment include Bend’s RBD Enterprises Inc., and two Redmond firms, MCSI Inc. and Lancair International Inc.

The owner of another Bend company that works with NASA, Reytech Inc., was away on vacation. Like Service Physics, RBD Enterprises upgrades analysis systems, according to its Web site.

The company has had several contracts with NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland since 1999, according to the National Association of Investigative Specialists Inc. (NAIS), an investigative services company based in Austin, Texas.

Marilyn D. Stolz, a NASA contract specialist at the Glenn Research Center, declined to describe what work RBD has done for the space program.

MCSI, a Dayton, Ohio-based broadcast, computing and audio-visual company, worked with NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., last year, according to NAIS. That contract involved monitors and camera equipment, according to NAIS.

Sharmilla Rayo, an MCSI spokeswoman in Dayton, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Lancair had contracts with NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., from 1995 to 2001, according to NAIS.

The small-aircraft-kit manufacturer worked on light aircraft technology during that time, according to NASA documents.

Bob Fair, Lancair’s general manager, wasn’t available for comment.

Mike Cronin can be reached at 541-617-7836 or mcronin@bendbulletin.com.