McDermott International, Inc. reports it was awarded a sizeable* contract by Precision Mechanical, Inc. for a double wall liquid hydrogen sphere at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The scope of the contract includes the engineering, procurement and construction of the sphere, which will be the largest ever built for NASA.
"McDermott's CB and I Storage Tank Solutions has more than a century of experience delivering innovative and complex storage solutions," said Richard Heo, McDermott's Senior Vice President for North, Central and South America. "This liquid hydrogen sphere will be utilized for NASA's new Space Launch System/Orion program – a space frontier program focused on missions to Mars."
Using its proprietary Hortonsphere pressure sphere vessel design, McDermott will engineer, procure, fabricate and construct a 1,400,000-gallon cryogenic double wall sphere. The outer sphere has a diameter of 83 feet and an internal sphere of 71.6 feet – making the new sphere 50 percent larger than any sphere that has supported NASA's space shuttle program over the last 30 years. Additionally, the EPC project scope includes insulation (glass microspheres), internal heat exchanger, as well as painting, cleaning and testing.
Once completed, the sphere will arm NASA with the largest cryosphere constructed to date with the combined site capabilities to store and process over two million usable gallons of liquid hydrogen for launch support.
The contract has been reflected in McDermott's fourth quarter 2018 backlog.
