Image: Spencer Wells, a NASA mechanical engineering technician, tackles some welding at the Prototype Development Laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and Ben Smegelsky.
Inside Metal Fabrication at NASA By Dan Davis, Editor-in-Chief of The Fabricator
What’s it like to be a sheet metal fabricating expert at NASA? “Pretty cool,” said Spencer Wells, whose actual title is mechanical engineering technician, in the Prototype Development Laboratory (PDL) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Wells isn’t working on fabrications that other shops also might be doing—a new antibacterial gel dispenser for tourists, for example. The PDL team of engineers and engineering technicians are dedicated primarily to the design, fabrication, and testing of prototypes, test articles, and test support equipment for their NASA co-workers. At the time of this interview in November 2020, Wells had just wrapped up work on a project for the Artemis program, which has the goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2024. (The first test launch of the Artemis program is scheduled for later this
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year.) But PDL also supports the research and technology development laboratories at the space center and other major projects that might involve NASA partners, a more common occurrence as private industry and the government’s leading space exploration experts work more closely together. “It’s hard to explain the type of work we do. And the reason why it’s hard to say is not only because I can’t go into specifics, but also because we do so much here,” Wells said. “One week we supported an engineering group that wanted to test a new blanket material that was used for protection from heat. They wanted to know at what temperature it would fail. So they didn’t even necessarily walk out of here with a product, but they walked out of here with the answers they needed.”
