To the ISS and back: Science boxes manufactured by Spanflug
Spanflug manufactured aluminum parts for space biotech company Yuri GmbH supporting scientific research in space.
The project
When the SpaceX rocket lifted off with the CRS-27 capsule from the legendary Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 14, 2023, bound for the International Space Station (ISS), natural science projects of the Mission Ueberflieger2 in aluminum boxes manufactured by Spanflug were on board.
As a joint project of the space biotech company Yuri, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Luxembourg Space Agency (LSA), the mission offered three German and one Luxembourg student team the opportunity to send their scientific experiments to the ISS as a payload.
The experiments were carefully prepared by the teams with the utmost commitment and placed in aluminum boxes measuring 200 x 100 x 100 mm. After four weeks on the ISS, the boxes and their contents landed safely back on Earth. The evaluation of the research results could start immediately after landing.
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Yuri GmbH
As an aerospace startup from Lake Constance, we have been happy Spanflug customers almost since our founding. We know that Spanflug can be relied on even and especially for time-sensitive orders.
Spot on delivery times
“A request for hardware to fly into space is already a very special thing for us,” says Managing Director Markus Westermeier about the project for customer Yuri. “And for an order with the note ‘the rocket is not waiting for us…’ we naturally do everything we can to make at least a precision landing in terms of delivery time.”
Mark Kugel, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Yuri GmbH: “The requirements were high. The bottom and top parts of the cubes had to fit perfectly on top of each other. Especially when it came to shortening the delivery time, our contacts at Spanflug were able to implement a clean and flexible solution for us.”
Spanflug is extremely proud to have played a small part in the success of the mission and thus to be able to support research in space.
Take-off: The research teams were invited to attend the launch of the SpaceX rocket that transported their science boxes to the ISS.
Science boxes: For safe transport to the ISS and back, the research teams placed each of their scientific experiments in one of the aluminum boxes manufactured by one of Spanflug’ network partners.
Experiments: In this science box, the Glücksklee team from Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH) and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) are researching plant growth under zero gravity conditions. A camera transmits the process from within the box live to earth.
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