{"id":10508,"date":"2026-05-29T15:03:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T15:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=10508"},"modified":"2026-05-29T15:03:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T15:03:39","slug":"how-a-santa-ana-company-and-its-100-year-old-singer-made-orions-massive-parachutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=10508","title":{"rendered":"How a Santa Ana company and its 100-year-old Singer made Orion\u2019s massive parachutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Tutt, a warhead modeler turned parachute designer, has never jumped out of an airplane to see if the nylon canopies attached to cords and a body harness really work.<\/p>

Read more Santa Ana High Graduation 2026: Our best photos of the ceremony<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have experts that do that,\u201d said the 48-year-old, British-born Tutt, the director of engineering, space and recovery for Airborne Systems in Santa Ana.\u00a0 \u201cMaybe when I was a lot younger I had a desire to do that kind of thing. But not so much now. It\u2019s not a requisite to have jumped with parachutes to be able to design them or work for an aerospace company.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the company\u2019s 160,000-square-foot factory along Segerstrom Avenue, Tutt oversees a team of 30 engineers and hundreds of sewing machine operators from a second-floor office where he has a panoramic view of the sprawling factory floor below. That\u2019s where parachutes made of nylon and Kevlar are stitched together for everything from space capsules coming back to land on Earth or one day traveling to the surface of Mars or dropping military personnel on beachheads around the world.<\/p>\n