We Just Saw The Space Launch System (SLS)! 🚀🛰️✨

But first, a pop quiz💡

What building has the largest doors on the planet ❔ 🧑‍🚀🌝

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We Had a Blast at KSC 🔊 (Literally)

Last week, the team at MSI DFAT had the honor of presenting at the Artemis Orion Crew & Service Module (CSM) handover at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in sunny Florida, just a stone’s throw from Cape Canaveral. The energy was sky-high (pun intended), and we were proud to be surrounded by an incredible community of Artemis program suppliers.

More trivia (...I must be feeling extra generous today): Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology—hence the name of the newest program bringing us back to the Moon. 😉

We're all-in on supporting NASA and the U.S. mission to return humans to the lunar surface. It's been a while... and we're ready!

Lockheed Martin is aiming high with plans for an annual launch cadence of the SLS and Orion CSM through 2030. At MSI DFAT, we’re helping make that a reality. Our acoustic testing solutions drastically cut downtime—just a few days for full Crew & Service Module testing, with no spacecraft relocation required.

We’re proud to stand with Lockheed Martin and NASA (also, pun intended) to help deliver Rapid Program Delivery—because space doesn’t wait!

MSI DFAT standing with our fellow Artemis program suppliers!

By the way... Check out the enormous size of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA Kennedy Space Center!  👇👇👇

Special thank you to NASA and Lockheed Martin for the hospitality!

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MSI DFAT Hits the Stage at NOVEM 2025 🎤🇩🇪

Our very own Alex Carrella chaired a technical session and presented fresh research at NOVEM 2025 (Noise and Vibration Emerging Methods), held May 6–8 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

Dr. Alex Carrella chairing a panel session at NOVEM 2025.

This global conference only happens every three years and brings together leaders tackling the cutting edge of:

• Structural Vibration

• Vibro-Acoustics

• Flow-Induced Noise & Vibration

• Noise and Vibration Control

This year’s agenda delivered some serious brain fuel, with keynotes covering:

• Psychoacoustic Noise Control of Electric Drives

• Physics-Guided Machine Learning in Vibroacoustics

• Vibroacoustics of Space Vehicles 👈 (yep—that’s us!)

Always proud to represent MSI DFAT on the international stage—and even prouder to help shape the future of spacecraft testing!

We're always evolving - from rockstars to rockets!

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T-Minus 21 Days to SCLV 🚀

Papers, publications, and PowerPoints... oh my!

We’re gearing up for the Spacecraft and Launch Vehicle Dynamic Environments Workshop (SCLV), happening June 3–5 in sunny Los Angeles—and MSI DFAT is showing up big. Dr. Alex Carrella, Wes Mayne, and Alan Merrick will present two cutting-edge research papers in collaboration with our friends at ESI VA One, Rabah Hadjit and Alexis Castel.

Here’s a sneak peek:

📝 MIMO Control for DFAT Testing Equivalence to Reverberant Field Testing

👤 R. Hadjit, W. Mayne III, A. Carrella, A. Castel

Get into the weeds with how DFAT compares to traditional reverberant field testing, using simulation and panel response data to validate field accuracy and guide future modeling strategies.

📝 Acoustic Testing on this Shakey Earth

👤 A. Merrick

With over 220 DFAT tests across seismic zones, we’ve learned how to keep towering speaker stacks safe and stable—even in earthquake-prone environments. This session breaks down the structural engineering behind it.

Join us in L.A. as we share our latest work and push the boundaries of spacecraft acoustic testing.

👉 Register for SCLV

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A:  The VAB stands 525 feet tall, 716 feet long, and 518 feet wide. It encloses 129 million cubic feet of space—big enough to fit a Saturn V rocket vertically. The building is so massive, clouds can form near the ceiling on humid days. To prevent this, it’s equipped with one of the world’s largest air conditioning systems. The VAB was originally constructed for assembling Saturn V rockets in the 1960s, and later used for Space Shuttle stacking. It is now being modified to support the Artemis missions with the Space Launch System (SLS).

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Launching things into space? 🚀🛰️✨

👉 info@msidfat.com

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Concerts to Cosmos: The Acoustic Evolution of MSI-DFAT in Songs of Apollo Documentary Series

MSI-DFAT was recently invited to be featured in the documentary series "Songs of Apollo" created, written, filmed, and produced by M. Kevin White. We invite you to dive into the wild world of acoustic testing in the space industry.

Over the last six years, Mr. White had been steadily developing a documentary series called "Songs of Apollo." With over 40 interviews and hundreds of hours of footage collected, it has been an epic journey. This week, he has released a precursor to the series: "Concert to Cosmos: The Acoustic Evolution of MSI-DFAT."

This featurette showcases the pioneering efforts of MSI-DFAT in transforming spaceflight testing. By using powerful loudspeakers to subject spacecraft to intense acoustic forces, MSI revolutionized Direct Field Acoustic Testing. Leveraging extensive experience with iconic musicians like Pink Floyd and David Bowie, we have turned our sound expertise into a vital technology used for the enablement of space exploration, seamlessly blending creativity and science. 

Please follow the series progress at songsofapollo.com and watch the first installment here.

Special thanks to M. Kevin White and his wonderful wife for their kindness and creativity.

Launching expensive opto-electro-mechanical objects into outer space?

👇

info@msidfat.com

Navigating the Process of Research & Development

Our R&D Journey

In my last blog post, “Operational Modal Analysis with DFAT”, I briefly shared an introduction to the groundbreaking work that MSI DFAT and Siemens DI SW pioneered in Modal Testing and Analysis. We were not just experimenting with unproven systems for the first time – actually, we are currently under contract to carry out the largest combined experimental and operational modal analysis with Direct Field Acoustic Testing (DFAT®) in the known history of experimental test engineering - one we hope to co-publish a paper on with our client soon. Pushing boundaries is nothing new for us; it’s a challenge we’ve taken on for over three decades.

This journey inspired me to delve into the exciting path MSI DFAT has taken in Research & Development, and the subsequent “proof in the pudding” that have helped establish our technology as the industry-leading gold standard. Since I've found great satisfaction in being part of our R&D efforts from the market research side (i.e., researching the true customer needs for vibroacoustic testing first-hand), I thought you might enjoy hearing about it too…

The Story About Research…

Every research project tells a story. The challenge, however, is that not all stories are worth reading. There are certainly “investigators” out there who craft their narratives first and then try to back them up with “research”. But when it comes to head-to-head benchmark comparisons, we often find that imitators of our DFAT technology and methods can’t improve at all upon even the oldest innovations we’ve made decades ago (scroll to our timeline).

In the planning stages of research, it’s essential to harness energy to map out a path forward. A plan helps us gear up for the research, anticipate potential obstacles, and provides a framework to navigate uncertainty. There have been times when we began with over a hundred test cases, only to narrow them down to just ten before realizing we needed to change course entirely. For some, this shift might feel like a setback, but for us, it’s thrilling to be redirected from an initial idea to a more effective and adaptive solution.

Take, for instance, our very first forays into R&D for Direct Field Acoustic Noise (DFAN) testing. The first test we conducted with concert-type sound systems (line arrays) showed promise – but it was some incredibly expensive R&D! Our founder, Bob Goldstein, and Chief Engineer Paul Larkin, managed to blow up millions of dollars worth of line-array concert speakers during the initial DFAN tests. Ouch! They quickly realized that traditional concert speakers weren’t going to cut it for replicating launch conditions and shifted their focus to designing more powerful, compact, lightweight, simple-to-operate and structurally stable DFAT systems.

R&D didn’t stop there. We also sought out the brightest minds in test engineering globally, such as Dr. Marcos Underwood, “the godfather of MIMO testing”, to help pioneer advancements in Multi-Input, Multi-Output (MIMO) control methodologies. Today, using state-of-the-art MIMO noise control systems (NCS), we proudly say that our DFAT system is the only one in the world utilizing true narrowband MIMO control for precise response limiting. Other systems still rely on wide, and often risky, third-octave bands.

Another brilliant addition to our team is Wes Mayne. Wes helped MSI DFAT understand the key differences between traditional Reverberant Facility Acoustic Chamber Testing (RFAT) and Direct Field Acoustic Noise Testing (DFAT). Having designed RFAT facilities worldwide, Wes was instrumental in our understanding of the core benefits of DFAT over RFAT, and bringing the technology to the market.

Recently, a few unproven and risky startups have tried to enter the DFAT market, but they’ve largely failed thus far. With only a couple tests under their belt and a few very small system installations globally, we have so far been largely ignoring the noise. We had hoped the efforts of these companies would stoke the flames of healthy competition and help push the technology forward, ultimately benefiting the industry at large. After all, any improvements that help our customers further speed up testing, reduce costs, or lead to better results would be a win for us too—even if we weren’t directly involved. However, several long-term clients evaluated these new DFAT systems and concluded that the “new” speaker technology was vastly underwhelming.

The speakers? Paraphrasing the voice of our customers: too bulky and heavy to fit in many Assembly Integration & Test (AI&T) facilities. For example, one system that was installed butted directly against a shaker table, leaving barely enough clearance - mere inches - from the speaker-face to the Unit Under Test (UUT) (reference the redacted image below). Acoustic measurements from such a poorly designed test setup would lead to contaminated results, if not outright failure for operators and equipment to effectively navigate within the tight test volume. The test levels? These loudspeakers couldn’t match the required acoustic spectra needed for clients’ testing specifications. The technology? Despite a couple new patents on box designs, it showed no real improvements over the DFAT systems already available.

Credit: Overhead of redacted DFAN testing system and UUT to scale for fair use (e.g., for commentary, criticism, and educational purposes).

This led me to ask a crucial question: Why are we even paying attention at all to alternative DFAN testing systems, and not trying to incrementally improve our own even more - for the sake of science and for our customers?

Development vs. Diversion

At this point, an old friend reached out with a surprisingly relevant question: “If you had to design a system for DFAT, how would you do it?” While I wasn’t the only one consulted, I immediately understood the weight of the question. I quickly shared a few observations from my recent experiences with customer engagements, and specifically the following, based on their commentary:

• Make the system compact, while still much more powerful than necessary (a comment I viewed as a jab at the bulky and oversized nature of other DFAN systems)

  
  

• Ensure the system is easy to set up, but not so simple that it loses its modularity or the ability to be tailored for specific tests (a comment I viewed as a playful reference to other DFAN systems that try to stuff all the frequency ranges into one super heavy and hard-to-move box)

  
  

• Guarantee that the setup is structurally stable and able to remain perfectly level as vertical height increases, to avoid tip-over risk to our spacecraft (something only our systems can do!)

  
  

This valuable feedback prompted MSI DFAT to design a completely new loudspeaker unit, adding even more capability to our repertoire. While we can’t share any details about this new design yet, it is already being used for contracted DFATs in 2025.

Learning From Mistakes

While new DFAN companies are bound to make many careless mistakes, we’ve long since learned to avoid almost every imaginable issue from a DFAN test. For example, new, unproven companies will likely place microphone arrays in the least optimal positions, or promise to meet acoustic testing specifications their unproven systems can’t possibly reach - just to gain a new client for some quick, short-term revenue.

Fortunately, MSI DFAT owns our design and production process, giving us the ability to make nearly instant changes solely for the benefit of our customers. Because of this flexibility, and our long-term mindset with R&D at the forefront, we continue to be the trusted partner in modern acoustic testing for the aerospace industry.