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By themselves, they don’t look like much — black threads thinner than strands of human hair, almost delicate to the touch. But weave those fine carbon fibers together in a fabric, coat them with a resin to hold them together, and now you have a material with which to build car bodies, airplane fuselages, boat...

Three of Washington state’s top aerospace suppliers are providing Bombardier’s Belfast factory for the new CSeries jet with sophisticated fabrication and assembly equipment, underscoring the globalization of the airplane industry.

Janicki Industries, a Sedro-Woolley-based engineering firm whose work includes high-end machining for aerospace manufacturers, will open a 50-employee plant in Utah to work on parts for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Imagine the USA, resounding winner of the 33rd America’s Cup sailboat race, sitting in the middle of Safeco Field. This trimaran would cover the infield. Its 223-foot wing sail would rise eight feet above Safeco’s roof, making it impossible to close.

Hollywood has its share of robots that have risen to stardom and most households know them by name: C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars; Rosie the Maid from The Jetsons; The Fembots from Austin Powers; and WALL-E from, well, WALL-E. And that’s only a few.

Janicki Industries inc., SedroWoolley, Wash., began as a developer and producer of large, 5-axis machine tools and applied them to manufacture large tooling for boat hulls. It then began providing machining services for other industries, including aerospace.

The race is over, and the Americas Cup has been won by “local boat” BMW Oracle. a trimaran built by Sedro-Woolley based Janicki Industries. It was never really a contest as the Oracle won the first of the best-of-three race off the coast of Spain with a 15 minute lead, and the second and wining race...

HAMPTON, Va. — A NASA team looking into design concepts for future space capsules has successfully demonstrated that an all-composite structure is a feasible alternative to traditional metal capsules for carrying astronauts into space and returning them safely to Earth.

For the past three years, the NESC has been evaluating a composite crew module as an alternative to the baseline Orion design. A tiger team was formed between Orion and the NESC team recently to compare opportunities and challenges. In 2006, the NESC studied the feasibility of a primary structure CCM for the Constellation Program...

Even as NASA’s Constellation program is designing the Orion crew module that will carry astronauts back to the moon and beyond, another NASA team is exploring alternate materials and fabrication techniques that promise even more advances for future spacecraft. Aerospace composites, not unlike the materials used in open-wheeled racecars and high-end sporting equipment, are lightweight...