The future is now and Las Vegas is
playing a part in plans to send humans
to Mars a news 3 special report space
geeks will love up next. For centuries
mankind is looking to the sky at the Red
Planet and could only wonder at the
possibility but in the not too distant
future reaching Mars will no longer be
science fiction. It's gonna be some
moment in tonight news 3 Steve Wolford
explains how some of those new pages of
human history are being written right
here in Las Vegas. The trip to Mars will
be made in a new space capsule called
Orion it's designed to support 12
Artemis missions that will take
Americans back to the moon as early as
2024 then on to Mars. But, before that
giant leap across the solar system
a few small steps are being taken at
UNLV College of Engineering.
When NASA's Orion capsule lifts off from
the Kennedy Space Center just a few
years from now it'll mark a new era in
American spaceflight and the culmination
of millions of hours of meticulous work
like this.
These UNLV engineering students are
testing the quality of an adhesive on
composite panels that will be used for
the walls and flooring inside the
spacecraft as part of a five-year
contract with Lockheed Martin worth up
to five million dollars. They're also
using the latest 3D technology to give
Lockheed a way to precisely cut holes in
the surface of the capsule within
thousandths of an inch.
I've always been interested in rockets
you know space stuff like that. I've
always kind of wanted to do something to
help out with NASA so
this is pretty much just you know my
dream come true. For the team including
grad student Victor Carbajal an
engineering graduate Louis Demola it's
a real-world experience for an
out-of-this-world mission. We spent all
day in class and in library working on
homework and then you can come into the
lab and actually apply that stuff and
see it what those numbers are actually
doing and seeing the theoretical line up
with projects are going beyond Earth.
Engineering department chair Brendan
O'Toole was heading up the team and says
helping take Americans to Mars is a rare
opportunity. And I've had an interest in
that my research way back younger was
structures composite structures for
aircraft and so getting back to doing
work for space program that's exciting.
Grad student Adam Gentle says he hopes
UNLV's contribution to Orion and
the Artemis missions they also help UNLV's
profile in the aerospace
industry and bring more research
projects like this to future engineering
students. I hope it brings in other other
programs and other other companies to
show that hey we can do this just like
any other big University from around the
country around the world that gives us a
little bit more validity if we're
working with companies like Lockheed
Martin. UNLV still has about two and a
half years left on the Lockheed Martin
contract so they're expecting to get
more work before the Orion space capsule
finally takes off and carries Americans
to the frontier of Mars back to you.
