V2X

Our supply chain management teams support almost 90,000 domestic shipments and more than 6,500 international shipments every year. Our pioneering Supply Chain as a Service approach can dramatically lower costs for our government clients as proven time and time again.

V2X Global Logistics and Supply Chain services expedite global operations, ensuring seamless execution to enhance mission readiness. As a long standing and trusted partner to the US Government, we remain steadfast in supporting the USAP mission both now and in the future.

Operations, Maintenance & Engineering Expertise

Our Reliability Centered / Conditions Based Maintenance approach ensures optimal readiness at the lowest cost and is a proven and reliable core capability of V2X.

We deliver a spectrum of support services for facilities engineering, operations, and maintenance. By managing key functions, from transportation management to physical security, our optimized services allow your personnel to focus on core mission requirements.

Focus on Science Support

V2X has a proven history in enabling science in support of critical missions. One of our flagship programs representative of space science support is the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) located at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas. V2X provides highly skilled services that include enriched-oxygen breathing gas production (Nitrox), life-support systems for submersed space-suited subjects, spacewalk procedure development and verification, operation of human-rated robotic systems, integrated audio and video systems, Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) training and evaluations, and computer network systems that are tied to International Space Station (ISS) simulations to generate emergency scenarios.

The NBL is a unique facility that is available 27/7 for critical training and mission support operations and is kept in a ready state to support the dynamic nature of human spaceflight. The 6.2-million-gallon pool, an essential tool for spacewalk training, simulates the weightlessness experienced by astronauts in space. This pool is 12 meters (40 feet) deep and roughly the size of 10 Olympic swimming pools.

For the past 30 years, it’s been used to help train astronauts for space exploration. The surface of the water is complimentary for practicing the recovery mission. That’s the final stage of spaceflight, when the capsule carrying crew members returns to Earth and splashes down into the ocean. Beneath the surface, the pool contains a replica of the International Space Station (ISS). Moving on and around this model, astronauts practice working in microgravity—the reduced pull of gravity that creates a sense of weightlessness in space.

The simulation will be used as a training ground for NASA’s upcoming Artemis program. The astronauts flying this series of missions will include the first woman and person of color to visit the moon. It will mark humanity’s first return to the moon in more than half a century. The crew will land near the moon’s south pole, an entirely unexplored region. There, they’ll encounter huge craters, extreme temperatures, and areas of permanent darkness. It’s a fascinating and challenging environment to reproduce.

Astronauts heading to the moon will need to be comfortable moving in lunar gravity, which is about one sixth that on Earth. That’s where the NBL comes in. Before entering the pool, astronauts are outfitted with weights and floats to wear underwater. These alter the astronauts’ buoyancy—the upward force that acts on objects in a fluid—to mimic the moon’s gravity. The idea of using buoyancy to simulate the effects of reduced gravity has been around since the earliest spacewalks. Artemis astronauts need to get used to walking, kneeling, and using tools while wearing them. And since the suits weigh roughly 181 kilograms (400 pounds) on Earth, it’s much easier to practice those movements in the simulated reduced gravity of the pool.

The south pole of the moon—where future astronauts plan to land—is even more inhospitable than the areas Apollo astronauts explored. The angle of the sun keeps low-lying areas in permanent darkness and bitter cold. Craters make the ground uneven and hard to navigate. To mimic aspects of this environment, V2X placed huge natural and manufactured boulders at the bottom of the NBL pool. They built sloped panels into the floor so astronauts can practice navigating the region’s uneven terrain. Programmable LED lights simulate the movement of the sun and the region’s extreme shadows. Engineered sand mimics the lunar regolith—the layer of dusty debris that covers the moon’s surface. With no wind or flowing water on the moon, there’s no weathering to wear and smooth regolith particles. So, they tend to be jagged. Regolith can stick to surfaces and make them slippery. Astronauts must practice moving around and using tools in it.

While on the moon, Artemis astronauts will collect samples of rocks more ancient than the oldest one’s scientists have uncovered on Earth. They also plan to study permanently shadowed areas within the crater basins, where temperatures hover around -203°C (-333°F).

This exploration could require astronauts to walk on the moon for more than six hours at a time. In the NBL’s lunar environment, astronauts can practice these missions from beginning to end, simulating entire spacewalks in real time. During training, instructors can observe the crew through live video feeds and communicate through a tethered cable, helping astronauts become familiar with procedures and learn what to do if something unexpected happens.

The goal is to anticipate every situation the crew might encounter on the lunar surface and enable them to respond quickly. We do everything we can to prepare them so that these procedures become second nature.

Other moon work is also ongoing at the water surface level of NBL: V2X participated in simulated landing operations of the Artemis 1 mission after years of practice in the pool. That uncrewed 2022 mission not only sent the astronaut-rated Orion spacecraft around the moon for the first time but had a flawless splashdown in part due to years of training and preparation for recovery operations.

For the V2X team, the goal is to make the environment as close as possible to the real thing. There’s no room for surprises in an extreme environment like space. The realism of our simulations is directly tied to crew safety and mission success.

The NBL operations contract continues the innovative technical and engineering support V2X has provided since 2003 including extending the lifecycle of the massive underwater mockups of the ISS. V2X also helped NASA lower the overall operating costs of the facility by bringing in external customers who take advantage of the unique, fully instrumented underwater facility. Among other uses, customers use the facility to train for operating unmanned vehicles offshore and undersea, conduct experiments in a microgravity environment and test underwater equipment.

Focus on Innovation