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No Next-Day Delivery: Shipping NASA’s Europa Clipper

How was NASA’s Europa Clipper — a 7,000-pound spacecraft — packed and shipped from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to Kennedy Space Center in Florida? Watch this video to find out. The spacecraft is expected to launch in October 2024 from Kennedy and arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030.

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 have you ever thought about how we take a spacecraft from the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California and move it to Florida to get [Music] launched so what you're seeing here is what we call High Bay 1 the engineers the technicians the quality assurance members of our team are actually getting our spacecraft ready the process for

    00:00:23 preparing the spacecraft is really a art form a dance one of the things that we have to think about is how we're going to make our spacecraft fit inside of our shipping container we have to figure out what Hardware needs to ship with the main spacecraft and what Hardware needs to be taken off like taking off the High Gain antenna one of the things we need to do is lift the spacecraft from its

    00:00:46 ground support equipment and move it into the shipping container stop okay perfect our multi-mission container was specially designed to carry spacecraft across the country that means that the temperature is controlled the environment's controlled how many particles that can be inside are controlled to make sure that our spacecraft stays clean and

    00:01:06 safe the spacecraft has an amazing journey once we're in the shipping container got [Music] [Applause] him it goes from JPL on a big semi it ends up at March air preserve base once it arrives at March we unload it and wrap rapidly move it into a c17

    00:01:32 for a flight that will take it to Kennedy Space Center so the spacecraft isn't the only thing that we actually pack up and ship across the country there's all of these things that we call Ground support equipment gsse that need to go with us those help us manage the spacecraft we have 12 trucks of ground support equipment and then we will have

    00:01:59 two trucks that support the spacecraft move itself so a grand total of 14 trucks emotionally this is one of the scarious periods of time it's the first time the spacecraft is going from a very very very controlled environment and going into more of an uncontrolled environment where other human beings are around behind the scenes is a lot of Engineers that are planning out every

    00:02:26 step of this process lots of members of our assembly test and launch operations team actually uproot their families and moved to Florida for 6 months my emotions for Europa Clipper in the spacecraft leaving is Bittersweet I think it's going to feel like if my kids go off to college when the spacecraft was here in Southern California I could come over and visit

    00:02:47 anytime I wanted to now in Florida it's going to be a little bit more difficult it's more like getting a phone call every other week but it's going to be exciting too because now our spacecraft is getting ready to do its final dance it's getting ready to graduate and be on its way to do this science around Europa this beautiful moon around Jupiter [Music]

    00:03:13 [Music]