Space exploration, metal fabrication, and moving forward

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing reminds everyone in the metal fabrication industry to remain curious and keep looking up. Getty Images

In the early 2000s I recall making my way to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., not to visit the museum (though I had done that) or be a tourist of any sort, but to visit an engineer responsible for a retractable-pin friction stir welding system that towered not far outside his office. The welding head wasn’t large, but the fixture was enormous, big enough to weld a Space Shuttle. That, of course, is what it did, fusing the seams of the Shuttle’s aluminum-lithium tanks.

About five years after that I recall talking with Chris Thompson, who in 2008 was vice president of structures at SpaceX, about the new way the company was tackling space exploration.

In 2011 I recall talking with Gene Wilson of Hardwick Co., a Birmingham, Ala.-based structural rolling shop. Wilson, who started working at the shop as a teenager in the 1950s, recalled a group of men arriving from Huntsville. The men arrived with proprietary plate and worked with the fabricators at Hardwick to roll it into a cone. Those cones formed the shell of space capsules.

Apollo anniversary tributes blanketed media outlets over the past week, and I didn’t mind. In many ways, it reminded me why I enjoy covering the metal fabrication business. It’s a business of exploration, and not just because rockets happen to incorporate fabricated metal. It’s because the people who thrive like to solve problems.

Let’s face it; there are easier ways to make a living. Metal fabrication is capital-intensive. The profits aren’t sky-high either, and everyone in the supply chain is scrambling to provide value. Fabrication can occur at the service center, at the custom fabricator, and at the OEM. A custom fabricator’s customers and suppliers can be its greatest competition. If you don’t serve our needs, that’s fine. We’ll just fabricate parts ourselves.

So what draws people to this incredibly competitive market? It goes back to problem-solving, be it a new sheet metal design for a product, an alternative fabrication or software technology, an efficient way to run a plant floor, or a combination of all the above. Profit makes the problem-solving sustainable, but the problems are what propels the best in this industry. People don’t just ask “What happened?” and wallow. They immediately ask, “What’s next?,” learn, and move forward.

And what grander “next” is there than space exploration? It has kept the curious looking up for more than 50 years, well before Apollo, before Hardwick Co. cone-rolled proprietary plate for space capsules for the Mercury program. When the curious keep looking up, literally and metaphorically, we all move forward.