Documenting NASA's OSAM-1 spacecraft Integration and testing phase
I take a lot of photos every day. Most of them are technical imagery used for engineering design and testing. Those photos you will never see, either due to the fact that you would not find them interesting or because they are considered controlled unclassified information (CUI). However my day job puts me in the room with very interesting people and very interesting activities. I try to photograph these things to as time allows and sometimes, these photos get approved for public release. The following photographs were all taken throughout the integration and testing phase of the On-Orbit Servicing Assembly and Manufacturing 1 Mission (OSAM-1). They have all been reviewed and approved for public release. These are not all the photos I have taken, and its not all the photos I have released. What you are scrolling through are some of my favorite photographs I have taken throughout my time with OSAM-1. Through these images you can watch the hardware be built up from a couple of circuit boards to a fully assembled spacecraft only a year of testing away from launch. Within these photos you will see the build process, but also the moments in between work when people are simply people, I like those moments especially.
OSAM-1 was a spacecraft that was designed to autonomously rendezvous with, capture, and refuel satellites that were never built to be refueled or repaired. The project was defunded by NASA due to budget constraints, a lot of the people in these photos lost their jobs because of this. The people in these photos are some of the most qualified and capable in their fields and yet, their stories are becoming more and more common each year. We never got to see our hard work launch, despite some people having been with the project for 10 years. The mission had gone through multiple changes in scope and the final year of the project was spent under the threat of cancellation. Despite this, the OSAM-1 team beat out all the odds, completing milestone after milestone to assemble the spacecraft. It broke our hearts when the order was finalized, knowing that despite those long days, and an attention to detail that can be found only at NASA, this mission was being put on the shelf.
These photos, and millions of dollars worth of hardware that are now sitting bagged up in a cleanroom are all thats left of the project until someone decides its worth picking up. personally, I thought this project was so sci-fi and cool and unique.
