Propellant Handling and Servicing

The NASA Propellants and Life Support Branch (PLS) at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station provides a comprehensive range of services and expertise for liquid propellants, pressurants, chemicals, and special fluids. Every year, PLS manages thousands of support operations for various spacecraft and payloads, including those from Atlas, Delta, Falcon, and the International Space Station.

The branch brings its extensive knowledge in logistics, engineering, and business to deliver safe, reliable, and cost-effective propellant support.

PLS offers a wide array of capabilities and services, including storage, handling, and servicing of various propellants, hypergolic, cryogenic, Freon, ammonia, helium, and nitrogen. They also provide expertise in propellant filtering and purification, composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) and pneumatic system servicing, and on-site chemical analysis for purity and particulate count.

Additionally, PLS offers material compatibility testing for hypergols and cryogens, advanced leak detection capabilities, and personal protective equipment development.

Some of the notable accomplishments of PLS include supplying propellants and SCAPE suits for flight operations at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, supporting the Orion Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014, manufacturing SCAPE suits for Vandenberg Air Force Base, designing and building molecular sieves for N2O4 purification for a JWST iron-leaching test project, providing hydrazine for NASA spacecraft missions like MAVEN, MSL, MMS, and DSCOVER, and supplying propellants for Morpheus Project test flights at the KSC Shuttle Landing Facility.

PLS also provides Breathing Air Purge Systems for Moon Express test operations and support for the Space Shuttle Program, including more than 235 cryogenic servicing and 90+ successful cryogenic de-servicing operations, as well as safely loading ammonia onto over 100 Space Shuttles, 7 ISS truss elements, and 5 ammonia tank assemblies.

The branch is also responsible for the largest and most diverse inventory of propellants and life support equipment at the KSC, managing and maintaining this inventory while providing technical expertise for the design and operation of propellant systems supporting space flight hardware processing.