Build, Build, Build For Benham

Science Applications International Corporation [NYSE: SAI] announced their subsidiary, Benham Companies LLC, has been awarded a $51.4 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The contract calls for Benham to design, engineer and build two testing facilities. Both facilities will support development of the Orion spacecraft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and the moon in the next decade. This will be among the largest such facilities ever built. The period of performance of the contract is 18 months, with an additional six months of post-commissioning technical support. The two projects will be developed at the Space Power Facility at Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, which is operated by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. As part of the contract, Benham also will design and deliver a new high-speed data acquisition system to collect, correlate and analyze testing data from these two facilities.




These two new testing facilities and the other facilities being readied under separate efforts will allow the Orion spacecraft, consisting of the launch abort system and the crew and service modules, to undergo thermal-vacuum, acoustic, mechanical vibration and electromagnetic compatibility evaluations within the confines of the SPF during development and qualification. These new testing facilities also will support NASA’s Constellation Program’s future spacecraft and other systems required for exploration missions to the moon, Mars and other destinations in the solar system—San Diego, California & McLean, Virginia