For more than 50 years, NASA astronauts have relied on duct tape as a solution for everything from a lunar rover on the moon to an air leak aboard the International Space Station. However, until now they had no easy way to dispense the glue.
Enter high school students from five different states who came up with the solution.
SpaceX Crew-1 Commander Mike Hopkins, a flight engineer with the space station’s Expedition 64 crew, recently demonstrated the HUNCH tape dispenser aboard the Earth Orbiting Laboratory.
“I think this tape dispenser will be used a lot here on the International Space Station,” Hopkins said in a video showing the device in action.
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HUNCH, or High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware, is a nationwide program that challenges students to design and build equipment that is then launched and used onboard the space station. Now in its 18th year, HUNCH students have built lockers, handrails, various tools and a galley table where the crew can eat and share meals. The program has even come up with a number of foods that have been added to the astronauts’ menus.
This latest project solved a sticky problem for the station’s crew.
“One of the main things I like about it is that you can basically operate it with one hand. Up here, you often use your other hand to stabilize yourself,” Hopkins said.
Before the HUNCH dispenser, rolls of duct tape – also called “gray tape” or “Mach 25 tape” – and Kapton high temperature tape were generally stuck to the edges of workplaces, handrails, or anywhere within reach. To cut the tape from the roll, the astronauts had to use scissors or in no time they ripped it with their teeth.
While crew members are able to use ready-to-use adhesive tape dispensers, available commercial solutions for the larger duct and Kapton tape rolls lacked a seat rail or other type of connector to be compatible with the station’s systems .
“It goes very easily on the guide rail and you can see that it is already in place,” Hopkins said of the HUNCH dispenser, mounting it on one of the walls of Destiney US lab.
“I can have several [types of] tapes at the same time, so that’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 underscores the many applications that tapes have on the drive. More than 20 different adhesives are used on board the orbital complex, although duct tape and Kapton tape are the most popular. The tapes are used for everyday activities, just like on Earth, but also to prevent objects from drifting in the microgravity environment of space.
Duct and Kapton tires have also been critical in space emergencies. In April 1970, gray tape was one of the tools needed to build a makeshift carbon dioxide air scrubber for the stranded Apollo 13 crew. Two years later, Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt relied on duct tape to hold a card together as a stand-in pad for their lunar rover on the moon.
More recently, astronauts have used Kapton tape to build and align custom tools for use on spacewalks to fix broken hardware on the outside of the space station. Duct tape was also used to temporarily repair a crack in a Russian module that is leaking air before a permanent fix could be devised and implemented this week.
In total, the HUNCH program has flown more than 800 items to the station built by 2,575 students from 277 participating high schools across the country.
“Congratulations to all students on the HUNCH project,” said Hopkins. “You knocked him out of the park.”
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