What's Happening

What did you do today? Oh, just helped someone go into space.

5.19.16

It is not very often you can say that in a conversation. It is always rewarding to see the fruition of your efforts. To stand back and see something that you made with your own two hands become part of something even better. In our case, it took more than two hands, 1,008 to be exact. It was a team effort. An amazing group of men and women who make up the Petersen Inc. team with locations in Ogden, UT and Pocatello, ID.

The Petersen Inc. team was contracted to assist in the renovation of the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. THE VAB is 526 feet tall, 716 feet long, and 518 feet wide. It covers 8 acres, and encloses 129,428,000 cubic feet of space. Not a feat we took lightly.

We’ve been busy for the past 2+ years producing this amazing piece of tooling that will allow the Vehicle Assembly Building personnel to operate in a safe environment. We fabricated, machined and manufactured all the platforms in-house at our facilities. For us at Petersen Inc., we build and assemble “the amazing” every day, and have been for over 56 years.

We’ve also been enthusiasts of, and involved in, the space program for quite some time. Denis Petersen, the founder of Petersen Inc., worked in the early days of the space program welding the Lunar Excursion Module that landed on the moon. Steve Petersen, his son and our current Chairman of the Board, led Petersen Inc. through the Space Shuttle days where we provided ground support equipment, tooling, and test equipment for the space program. Today, Steve Petersen’s son, Jake Petersen, is the Petersen Inc. Project Manager on the VAB project that will represent the next 20 years of the space program.

In the past several years, there has been a lot of structural steel fabricated in America, however, there’s only been one project such as this. It has simply been an amazing journey for us. We were fortunate to be selected by Steel LLC to be their partner on this project. It was massive in size, yet so precise to the very last detail.

As a company, we have always dreamed big and will continue to do so. It’s just part of who we are. “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. – Les Brown”