Work

Future Labs Expo Nasa / ESA Orion Shuttle Model

Goodwood Festival of Speed 2022

If you are lucky enough to be heading down to Goodwood this weekend please check out the Future Lab arena at Goodwood FOS of speed. We were honoured to be given the task of producing a scale mock up of the Nasa / ESA Orion Shuttle model for the show, which is proudly hanging at the entrance of Future Labs.

How long did it take?

This one was a bit of a record for us, we signed off the project on the first week of June and the completed model was delivered and installed on the third week of June, that was sub 3 weeks to create a full 3D CAD model and order all the components and time for assembly.

Which Processes were used?

This is the largest model LUMA have ever created, with the diameter of the shuttle coming over 400mm in size and a wingspan of over 1.2 meters, the only option was to FDM print the largest main shuttle part with the hugely experienced 3DTommorow, these parts alone were on the printer for a whole week, that’s a lot of PLA!

The solar array holders, the thrusters and details such as windows were all 3d printed in nylon with our friends over at 3DPRINTUK and we used a mixture of dyed black nylon SLS parts and MJF with its natural grey finish that gave the thruster parts a metal look with a little bit of painting and weathering.

Challenges of the project?

The very short timeframe was for sure the biggest challenge, ideally for a project such as this you can test print out various sections to confirm the design of the assembly works, but with this project we just had to go for it. We are very proud that this is our second project for Goodwood, read more about our work on last years post here, so we knew the conditions of delivering the model and the brilliant team over at Catapult who built the internal structures and stands and hung the model up, which I’m not going to lie, was quite an intense experience! 

Credit and big thanks to Aydin Mehmed who helped considerably in the painting and assembly of the project.

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