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The domestic market for gears and gear assemblies is forecast to increase 3.9% per year to $30.1 billion in 2013 according to a new study from The Freedonia Group Inc., a Cleveland-based industry research firm. This will be a considerable improvement from the less than 1% annual growth posted during 2003 to 2008. According to analysts, gains will be supported primarily by rebounding levels of motor vehicle production. In 2008, more than three-quarters of all gear sales were motor vehicle related, despite unusually low levels of production.

Gear manufacturers will also benefit from gains derived from product improvements and upgrades, such as transmissions with higher numbers of speeds. Increased sales opportunities will also come from the relatively small but rapidly expanding wind turbine market, in which large, high-value gearboxes are required. Output in the aerospace equipment and machinery industries is also expected to advance modestly from its level a decade earlier, which will restrain gear demand in those markets to some degree. These and other trends are presented in the new Gears study.

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NASA’s upcoming flight to service the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope will test more than 100 new tools developed to install and replace components, some of which designers never intended astronauts to fix on orbit.

Many of the STS-125 mission’s goals rely on devices that didn’t exist five years ago.

“Recently, due to some failures of instruments on board, we’ve had to design tools that fix things that weren’t anticipated to ever need to be fixed in space,” said Justin Cassidy, the lead systems engineer for Crew Aids and Tools at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For example, a power failure in 2004 crippled Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. After the failure was traced to the instrument’s power supply, Cassidy’s team set to work right away to develop a tool that would allow astronauts to replace it.

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