Boeing has recently conducted several tests at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville to demonstrate the readiness of the new fully composite cryogenic fuel tank for use on aerospace vehicles. This new technology has the potential to add more efficiency to future missions by significantly increasing the payload of those missions.

These tests feature a fully-composite, linerless cryogenic fuel tank, designed and manufactured by Boeing. The 14 foot wide cryogenic composite tank is almost the same in size to the fuel tanks intended for the upper stage of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which will be used to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon for the Artemis program.

The company said its engineers and their NASA counterparts put the cryogenic liquid-filled composite tank to a stress test, and the storage survived with pressure levels 3.75 times higher than design requirements. If the new composite technology were implemented in evolved versions of the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, the weight savings technology could increase payload masses by up to 30 percent.

“Composites are the next major technological advancement for large aerospace cryogenic storage structures,” said Boeing Composite Cryotank Manufacturing Lead Carlos Guzman. “And while they can be challenging to work with, they offer significant advantages over traditional metallic structures. Boeing has the right mix of experience, expertise and resources to continue to advance this technology and bring it to market in a variety of applications across aerospace and aeronautics.”

The cryogenic tank is lighter due to it not having a metal liner to reinforce it. However, it was still able to withstand 375 percent more than the intended operational pressures without a major structural failure.

Boeing’s Test Program Manager, Steve Wanthal, said the partnership between Boeing and NASA has been instrumental in the development process.

“NASA’s support through this testing has been invaluable,” said Wanthal. “We were able to use their technical expertise and investments made in the testing infrastructure at the Marshall Space Flight Center to continue to advance this technology, which will ultimately benefit the entire industry.”

As well as demonstrating the strength and capabilities of the new tank, the test also provided data that would support the company’s ongoing research on hydrogen as energy for commercial aviation applications. The recent project was sponsored by Boeing and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).