Space Exploration Technologies is a privately owned company that designs and manufactures advanced spacecraft and rockets. It is the only private company to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit. In October 2012, Dragon delivered cargo to and from the space station, in the first official cargo resupply mission for NASA.<\/p>\n
SpaceX designs its own rockets and spacecraft, and 80 percent of their vehicles are manufactured in house. This allows the company to develop quickly, test rigorously, and maintain tight control over quality and costs. Their main manufacturing facility is located in Hawthorne California and includes more than 500,000 square feet of production space. The facility is comprised of several work areas dedicated to avionics-, rocket-, and capsule-fabrication, quality control testing, and a glass walled mission control center for monitoring spacecraft in flight.<\/p>\n
The fabrication area is divided into large workspaces with machining, construction, and assembly cells. Additionally, each type of vehicle they manufacture requires its own fabrication area. When the facility began its operations in 2002, engineers installed permanent overhead material handling solutions to assist their enormous production line and assembly areas. However, in 2012, engineers at SpaceX began searching for a material handling solution that would enable them to move heavy loads throughout their facility with increased accuracy and precision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-1574","case_study","type-case_study","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n