For more than 50 years, NASA astronauts have relied on adhesive tape as a solution to everything from a lunar robber on the moon to an air leak aboard the International Space Station. Until now, however, they have not had an easy way of dispensing the adhesive.
Enter high school students in five different states who devised the solution.
SpaceX Crew-1 Commander Mike Hopkins, a flight engineer on the space station’s crew of Expedition 64, recently demonstrated the HUNCH tape dispenser aboard the orbital laboratory.
“I think this tape dispenser is going to be used a lot here on the International Space Station,” Hopkins said in a recording showing the device in action.
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HUNCH, or high school students affiliated with NASA to create hardware, is a nationwide program that challenges students to design and build equipment that is then launched and used aboard the space station. In the 18th year, HUNCH students built lockers, handrails, various utensils and a kitchen table for the crew to eat and share at meals. The program even came up with some of the food items added to the astronauts’ menus.
This latest project has solved a tough problem for the crew of the station.
“One of the most important things I like about it is that you can basically operate it with one hand. Here, you regularly use your other hand to stabilize yourself,” Hopkins said.
In front of the HUNCH dispenser, rolls of adhesive tape – also called ‘gray tape’ or ‘Mach 25 tape’ – and Kapton high temperature tape are attached to the edges of work areas, on handrails or anywhere. To cut the tape off the roll, the astronauts had to use scissors or tear it with their teeth in a pinch.
Although crew members can use dispenser for the adhesive tape, the available commercial solutions for the larger tube and Kapton tape rollers do not have a seat track or any other type of connection to comply with the station’s systems.
“It’s very easy to get on the guide rail and you can see it’s already in place,” Hopkins said of the HUNCH dispenser as it mounted on one of the walls of the U.S. Destiney Laboratory.
‘I can have multiple [types of] tape at the same time, so it’s nice too, ‘he said.
The HUNCH tape dispenser was developed and built by students at Windsor High School in Windsor, Connecticut; Lakewood High School in Lakewood, Colorado; Cypress Woods High School in Cypress, Texas; Decatur High School in Decatur, Alabama; Clear Creek High School in League City, Texas; and Dade County High School in Trenton, Georgia.
The need for the tape dispenser highlights the many uses that tires have at the station. More than 20 different adhesives are used on board the runway complex, although adhesive tape and Kapton tape are the most popular. The straps are used for everyday activities, just like on Earth, but also to prevent items from floating in the micro-gravity environment of space.
Duct and Kapton tires were also the most important in space emergencies. In April 1970, gray tape was one of the tools needed to build a temporary carbon dioxide air washer for the stranded Apollo 13 crew. Two years later, Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt relied on adhesive tape to hold a map together as an insertion pattern for their lunar robber on the moon.
More recently, astronauts used Kapton tape to build and feed custom tools for use on spacewalks to repair broken hardware on the outside of the space station. Adhesive tape was also used to temporarily load a tear in a Russian module leaking air before a permanent solution could be devised and implemented this week.
In total, the HUNCH program flew more than 800 items to the station, which was built by 2,575 students from 277 high schools across the country.
“Congratulations to all the students on the HUNCH project,” Hopkins said. “You knocked it out of the park.”
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