DNC the Easy Way
The Johnson Space Center Manufacturing Services Group Has Found a Fast, Easy Way to Communicate with Its Manufacturing Equipment

.Story by C. H. Bush, editorPhotos courtesy NASA


Students at a local Houston area (Clear Creek)high school use the Calmotion USBCNC connected to the RS-232 port to load their hand-written G-code into old Lagunamatic 3-axis mill donated to their school by the Johnson Space Center. The kids had trouble get-ting their programs into the machine from a PC, but with USBCNC it was easy.

Everyone knows about NASA’s mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. After all, some of the most famous words ever spoken were, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” That, of course, was the message sent to the Houston Control Center when Apollo 11 first touched down, followed soon after by Neil Armstrong’s famous words as the first man on the moon. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Every school kid knows that history. But not everyone realizes that the Johnson Space Center is also home of the 130,000 sq ft Manufacturing Services Group, a huge machine shop, design and fabrication center that produces components and spare parts for many major NASA projects.

“Probably our three biggest projects at the moment are the International Space Station, the new Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Lunar Exploration Rover,” says Daniel Cencer, manufacturing engineering supervisor for the group. “For the space station we design and build many things they need, ranging from exercise equipment, repair parts, special socket wrenches to major components. Our job is to give them what-ever they require.

”The Crew Exploration Vehicle (see next page) is America’s new human space exploration aircraft, designed to take the place of the space shuttle.


Daniel Cencer, manufacturing engineering supervisor, shows off what he considers a long run of parts produced by the Manufacturing Services Group at the Johnson Space Center.

“The CEV will be able to ferry crews of three astronauts, plus cargo, to and from the space station. Later on, it will take four crew members into lunar orbit, and will be used on the Mars mission. The LER (Lunar Electric Rover, editor) will be used sometime next decade to explore the moon. We get some pretty exciting projects here.”

Cencer has a bachelor’s degree in aircraft engineering from Western Michigan University and a masters degree in space robotics from the University of Maryland in College Park. In one job or another he has been with the Johnson Space Center since 1991.

“I’ve been involved in things space from day one,” Cencer says. “My first job out of school was with the company in Delaware that made spacesuits for astronauts. From there I moved on to working on the tools that the astronauts use when they’re in orbit. After that I got interested in space ro-botics and quit my job to go back for a masters in space ro-botics. In one case, I invented an add-on to the dexterous robot that’s going to be on the space station. A lot of my early career was spent designing things for use in space.”

Today, however, Cencer’s job is to supervise a group of five enginee.

“What my group does is to participate in the development of new designs,” he says. “Specifically we help the engineers design products to be more manufacturable. And then when the designs are ready to go into manufacturing we supervise the manufacturing aspect of the project.”

In order to do his job, Cencer and his team must be intimately familiar with all the different types of manufacturing equipment at the Space Center.

“Most people are amazed by the size of our shop and the numbers and different kinds of equipment we run here,” he says. “Basically, we tend to have whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Space Center Equipment

“We’re not a job shop, so we don’t do production machining,” Cencer adds. “Our runs go from one to a handful of parts. Most of our work is highly customized. Our machinists work with our designers to make sure they get it right. Some of the parts are being designed and fabricated at the same time.”

The Space Center’s capabilities run the gamut from preci-sion machining, sheet metal, welding, cleaning, hydrostatic testing, coatings, soft goods, metal finishing, models and plastics, and assembly. The facility operates horizontal and vertical mills of all types, turning centers, EDMs, welders, including a new friction stir welder, press brakes and rollers.

Because of its age, the Johnson Space Center has a tremendous variety of machines, some highly advanced and some dating back before CNC came to be the standard.“

Sometimes the equipment still has the necessary precision, but the controllers are slow and outdated and tend to slow production,” Cencer says. “For instance, we recently had a couple of cases where the controller on one machine didn’t have much memory, which meant we had to drip feed the programs. On another machine, the programs were so huge that feeding from a PC to the controller took several hours, which was a waste of time.”

Simple DNC Solution


The CEV is America’s new spacecraft for human space exploration. It will be able to ferry crews of three astronauts (plus additional cargo) to and from the International Space Station, but has the capability to carry up to six crew members. It will take four crew members to lunar orbit, and even return up to six crewmembers to Earth on the final leg of a human Mars mission. Shown is a full-sized mock-up of the CEV to be used for testing its antennas.

The Space Center is too huge to be able to replace all the equipment or to rewire it with an advanced DNC setup. What was needed was a simple, practical, low-cost solution that would speed productivity and that would be easy to use.


View of the Calmotion portable USBCNC Disk Key Reader. The system can be built in to a machine, or used to move from ma-chine to machine. Note the USB disk key, the RS232 connection and the power plug in.

“The solution we found was a simple little box called a USBCNC Disk Key Reader from Calmotion LLC,” Cencer says. “The box comes in two versions. One you can build into the control panel on a machine. The other is completely portable. The product is small, but powerful. Basically, you load a program into the USB flash drive on the unit, then plug the unit into the RS-232 connection on the CNC controller. The USBCNC has a small control panel with buttons to navigate up and down and one button to select the menu option. On one machine, which has low memory, the USBCNC acts as a DNC and drip feeds the program to the machine. The remarkable thing about the unit is its transfer speed. It’s very fast. On one application with a huge G-code program, we were able to cut each of seven program transfer times by an hour and a half. The unit paid for itself in about three days.”


Partial vew of the Johnson Space Center 130,000 sq ft Manufacturing Services Group fabrication center. The center operates hundreds of machines to be able to meet NASA’s ongoing demand for parts and equipment.

Email DNC

Since the Space Center isn’t wired for a central DNC sys-tem, people there found a simple, but elegant solution.

“Most of our workbenches either have a PC on them or they have one nearby,” Cencer says. “So we just email the programs to the PC nearest the target machine. The operator copies the program to the flashdrive, sticks it in the USBCNC and he’s in business. We’ve subsequently purchased three or four more of the units, which will be used to deliver programs to our Hurcos and other equipment. It seems too simple a so-lution, but it works. We love the little boxes.”

HUNCH Program

The Space Center works with local high schools, donating older equipment to their machine shops and helping out with the training. HUNCH is an acronym for “High Schools United with NASA to build Spaceflight Hardware”

“We had one group at the local Clear Creek High School where we donated an old Lugunamatic machine,” Cencer says. “The problem was, the kids couldn’t figure out how to hook up their PC to transfer their programs to the machine. We talked to Calmotion, and they donated a USBCNC to the program. The kids love it, because they were able to quickly get their programs into the old machine. The menu system on the USBCNC is really easy to use, which is great. We do a lot of big things here at the space center, but we also appreciate small, simple solutions. As far as we’re concerned, if it works and gets the job done, we love it.”