Old textile firm in Berks makes NASA product

BALLY, Pa. - The path to Mars goes through this small Berks County town that has long been a hub for textile manufacturing in the region stretching from Allentown to Reading.

So said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden during a visit Friday to Bally Ribbon Mills, a family-owned business founded in 1923 to weave hat bands out of silk.

Bally Ribbon, with the fourth generation in the business, still has shuttle-loom frames from that era. Those looms now make ribbons for military medals.

Now, Bally Ribbon also produces materials that go into medical implants and space vessels, including the Orion spacecraft, which is scheduled for its next test flight in 2018, with manned flight to Mars as its long-term goal.

"We cannot get to Mars without the types of material being developed here," Bolden said, "without the compression pads that are going between Orion, which is the crew module, and the service module, which provides power and propulsion."

Bolden said that while NASA has relied on industry giants, such as Lockheed Martin Corp., the prime contractor for Orion, for big projects, none of what it does is possible without small innovators like Bally, which played a key role in developing the pads that help protect Orion's passenger capsule during reentry.

"If it's something that's got fibers in it, what we typically call textiles, they can probably do it," Bolden said of Bally Ribbon.

Bally Ribbon employs 270. The company declined to disclose its revenue. NASA spent close to $4 million with Bally Ribbon in fiscal 2014, said Glenn A. Delgado of NASA's Office of Small Business Programs.

Bally Ribbon has a long history of working with new materials, company president Ray Harries said.

"We had a good relationship with DuPont during World War II, when they invented nylon," he said. DuPont would send Bally Ribbon new fibers to be woven into samples. That helped the company develop a reputation for innovation, Harries said.

The three-inch-thick Orion pads are woven from pure quartz fiber. The trick to their design is three-dimension weaving, which means that threads go up and down through the pads, not just lengthwise and crosswise.

The three-dimensional weaving is key because material made that way holds together better than laminates, said W. Michael Hawes, Lockheed Martin's program manager for the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle.

Space shuttles reentered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 17,500 m.p.h. Orion will reenter at 36,000 m.p.h., officials said.

Susan Grebe, 57, who was monitoring the machine making the pads for Orion, has worked at Bally Ribbon for 39 years.

Said the Boyertown resident: "My grandkids are so excited to see what I'm doing."