Rocket Factory Tour at ULA
 

A friend sent me this YouTube video link.

Its a Rocket Factory Tour at United Launch Alliance (ULA) in Alabama. ULA CEO Tory Bruno takes Smarter Every Day guy (Destin) on a tour of their facility. Bruno is amazingly open about their rockets, their technologies, the manufacturing machinery used, and Destin has a mechanical engineering background, so he keeps it interesting by asking lots of great questions. Thoroughly fascinating.

The new technologies now available make the discussion and show and tell on the next generation Vulcan rocket pretty amazing. See things like friction stir welding that welds the metal without any melting at the joint, and 40 foot tall fuel tanks made from aluminum 1/2 the thickness of a dime!

https://youtu.be/o0fG_lnVhHw

Wow
 

Thank you Lee. Very interesting. Good post!

It's cool how the CEO has pretty detailed knowledge of every aspect of manufacture. I know he's a "rocket scientist" too, but as a CEO pencil pusher, he still seems to still have his engineering finger on a little bit of everything.

The CEO, Tory Bruno, is lucky to be alive. In another video he talked about finding 80 year old nitro sweating dynamite in his grandmother's barn, which he used as propellant in steel pipe for his first rockets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-vXJL8jXBk

He's smart as hell, and very personable too. I really respect him. In no way is he removed from technical decisions - it just tends to be the really big ones that get to his level. His predecessor, Michael Gass, was a bit of a wet blanket. Tory, on the other hand, is quite funny. I don't follow Tory's twitter, but my son does, and he occasionally shows me Tory's tweets. He's constantly hounded by SpaceX fanboys, but he holds his own. Check it out some time.

My favorite recent response to a dumb question:

What did you have for breakfast?
Tory: Mission Success!

He is very lucky! I meant to post that link, besides the plant tour. He description of the mission for the launch is pretty cool.