International joint ventures in space: The international space welding experiment

The International Space Welding Experiment (ISWE) was a joint venture between the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama and the E.O. Paton Welding Institute (PWI) in Kiev, Ukraine. ISWE was manifested as an element of the United States Microgravity Payload-4 (USMP-4) to demonstrate the feasibility of space welding as an operational maintenance process. On December 6, 1996, ISWE was demanifested due to conflicts between various experiments vying for limited astronaut EVA opportunities. Current plans include possible manifesting to the Russian space station MIR for welding to be performed by Russian cosmonauts. This paper illustrates the conflicts that can arise when designing and building a set of spaceflight hardware under one set of standards and trying to launch that hardware on another nation's vehicle. Issues which became areas of concern included language/communication, openness, qualification test procedures, material standards, and safety. The significant number of issues identified in this relatively small project in international space cooperation indicates how important it will be to reach a new consensus for conducting future large scale cooperative ventures. Imperative to attaining this consensus is an international conference where all space faring nations mutually develop and agree to a uniform set of standards.