Boilerplate (spaceflight)
A boilerplate spacecraft, also known as a mass simulator, is a nonfunctional craft or payload that is used to test various configurations and basic size, load, and handling characteristics of rocket launch vehicles.
It is far less expensive to build multiple, full-scale, non-functional boilerplate spacecraft than it is to develop the full system (design, test, redesign, and launch).
These tests may be used to develop procedures for mating a spacecraft to its launch vehicle, emergency access and egress, maintenance support activities, and various transportation processes.
The boilerplate capsules were designed and used to test spacecraft recovery systems, and escape tower and rocket motors.
Historically, during the development of the Little Joe series of 7 launch vehicles, there was only one actual boilerplate capsule and it was called such since its conical section was made of steel at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
Specifically, 1101A tested the air bags as part of the uprighting procedure when the Apollo lands upside down in the water.
[16] This McDonnell boilerplate is now on loan to the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum,[17] Denver, Colorado, from the Smithsonian.
[citation needed] It was then modified again where the interior was set up to be configured either as Apollo/Soyuz or a proposed five-person Skylab Rescue vehicle.
It was finally transferred from NASA to the Smithsonian in 1977, and is displayed now at the Udvar-Hazy Center with the flotation collar and bags that were attached to Columbia (the Apollo 11 Command Module) at the end of its historic mission.
[20] The purpose of this series design was to simulate the weight and other external physical characteristics of the Apollo command module.
[30] Following its use as a test article, the mockup was stored until 1983, when it was refurbished and modified to more closely resemble an actual orbiter, before being displayed in Tokyo.
[32] The STA was built as essentially a complete orbiter airframe, but with a mockup of the crew compartment installed, and the thermal insulation only fitted to the forward fuselage.
[33] The simulation testing of the STA was undertaken over the course of eleven months following its rollout in February 1978; at the time, it was intended that the prototype orbiter Enterprise would be converted into a full flight ready model, but the cost of undertaking this work, along with a number of design changes that had taken place between Enterprise being rolled out, and the final construction of the first operational orbiter, Columbia, meant that it was decided instead to upgrade the STA into a flight model.
This would see Enterprise mated to an empty External Tank and dummy Solid Rocket Boosters, creating a boilerplate version of the complete Space Shuttle stack for the first time.
[citation needed] Other boilerplates would be used to test thermal, electromagnetic, audio, mechanical vibration conditions and research studies.
