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News Release For more information: SPACEHAB Selects Johnson Engineering to Provide May 19, 1998 Vienna, Virginia. SPACEHAB announced today that it has selected Johnson Engineering of Houston, Texas to provide sustaining engineering, system development and integration support for its Wake Shield Facility (WSF) space laboratory. In a separate agreement with the University of Houston, announced May 7, 1998, SPACEHAB has acquired the rights to manage and market the WSF space laboratory to commercial and government customers. Included in the Johnson Engineering effort is the establishment and operation of a flight hardware processing facility in the Houston area. This facility will be used for the WSF system development, test, and checkout and will also be used for other flight equipment that SPACEHAB is currently developing. According to Mike Chewning, SPACEHAB’s WSF Program Manager, “This is a key first step to reassemble the WSF engineering team and bring the hardware out of storage. We have set a very aggressive goal for the flight system to be ready for a mission in mid 1999 and we are all anxious to get started. Tom Short, the President of Johnson Engineering, said that “JE is very pleased that we have been selected to provide engineering and integration support to SPACEHAB, and we are really excited about being involved in a commercial space flight project.” Johnson Engineering has been one of the leading small business contractors at the Johnson Space Center for over twenty years, providing services and products used on the Shuttle, Shuttle-Mir and International Space Station programs. For the past ten years, JE has been under contract to the Flight Crew Support Division of the Space and Life Sciences Directorate, responsible for design, development, and fabrication of mock-ups and trainers, the development and provisioning of flight crew equipment, crew station integration, human systems engineering, configuration management support, facility operations and sustaining engineering. SPACEHAB, Inc., with its ASTROTECH subsidiary, is the world’s leading provider of commercial payload processing services for both astronaut-tended and unmanned payloads. SPACEHAB is the first company to commercially develop, own, and operate habitable modules that provide space-based laboratory facilities and logistics resupply aboard the U. S. Space Shuttles to support the people living and working in space. |