There’s an old Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” If you are a contemporary of mine, a fiftysomething, you are fortunate indeed to have experienced the irritation of this expression of adversity in abundance. You have seen peace, war, assassination, impeachment, the birth of the atomic age, the eradication of some diseases, the Sixties, the advent of computers and the Internet and much, much more. But of all the history made during our time, the most inspiring single world event, in my opinion, was man’s outreach into space culminating in Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon and every manned mission that followed Apollo 11.

About three decades have passed since humans last walked on the moon. In the past, I have complained about the fact that America, when it scrubbed its remaining Apollo moon missions in the 1970s and shelved the program, allowed itself to forget how to repeat the triumph. NASA, via its space shuttle and amazing solar system explorations, has carried on through its successes and despite its tragedies, yielding much to our body of knowledge about science and space technologies in the process. But orbital missions, though still meaningful, do not capture the human spirit and the American psyche as the manned lunar missions did.

It was with great enthusiasm and support, then, that I heard President Bush’s announcement in January 2004 that he proposed to send Americans back to the moon, and even beyond to Mars, in the next few decades. The revisit to the moon is targeted for 2018, and the Mars attempt for 2030.

This renewed interest in manned missions started me thinking about the special metal cutting and joining challenges humans have had to overcome or have yet to tackle to successfully and safely achieve the manned missions on NASA’s docket. It has taken a lot of sophisticated, exotic, high quality metal cutting, joining and testing to get to where we have gotten in space.

And what about welding in space? Can a proper welding arc be struck and maintained in space? If that answer is ‘yes,’ then what of the threat of weld spatter in a zero gravity environment to an astronaut’s pressure suit? No shielding gas would be needed in space, but could a flow of gas over a welding surface help control spatter, or would a substitute for gravity ( such as centrifugal force) need to be induced? Can difficult-to-weld exotic materials be welded more easily in space? And what of the metallurgical properties of welds made in space?

We already know that a manned moon mission that lasts only days can succeed without welding capability aboard the spacecraft. However, a lot can go wrong on a manned mission to Mars, which would last many months, that might require extra-vehicular welding for repairs. Some experiments for space welding techniques have been pre-tested as underwater training projects, but searches on the Internet have not yielded a lot of information about welding in space.

For this I am hoping to enlist the help of our readers. There is welding for space and welding in space. We are interested in both. If you have experience in metal welding, cutting, or testing unique to space hardware applications, then we’d be glad to hear from you about those applications. Similarly, if you’ve studied welding in a space environment, we’d love to hear more about your work.

Please send any correspondence to me in care of the magazine, for which I thank you in advance. I will be happy to devote future columns to the information you provide.