Page 110 - MY STORY

There was no contract, no formal signing of an agreement,
just the word of the participants. Phil S took over the
welding development and evaluation, while I led the

charge to develop the appropriate metallurgical
treatments, mechanical properties, and fracture toughness
design data. We and U.S. Steel met all of our “handshake”

agreements and openly shared all the data the team
generated during this self-funded effort.

We made friends in high places at U.S. Steel and got to
know their executives very well. In fact, when meetings

finally took place with senior Douglas executives, Phil
and I had never met the Douglas executives, while we
knew the U.S. Streel ones on a first name basis.

Our development effort was highly successful. As the
initial program neared completion we briefed the key folk

at NASA-Huntsville on our efforts to become key
competitors in the development of the large
single-stage-to-orbit launch system. At the same time,

Phil had worked out the welding methodology for this
alloy using high deposition rate metal-inert-gas (MIG). I
think today it’s called gas-metal-arc (GMA). Our next

step was to try and figure out where we could build these