In a 1988 paper released by NASA and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Soil Transport Implement, researchers presented an outline for the design of a component that would protect a vehicle that was being designed for moon expeditions. At that point in NASA’s history, the moon landing was becoming a comparatively distant memory. The Challenger disaster was only half a decade in the past, and the Rogers Commission had determined that NASA’s institutional culture was lacking and may have been responsible for the faults that contributed to the disaster.

Occasionally I find myself looking over papers like these from NASA. My background isn’t in science, math or engineering, so most of it looks like scribbles to me. But I think the manned space program is the pinnacle of human achievement so far, and it’s easy for me to spend hours perusing even minute technical papers like Soil Transport Implement. One of the components of the STI (the mechanism described in the paper) is made of a die cast magnesium alloy. In my capacity as editor of this die casting blog, I’ve looked for ways to involve die casting in the narrative of modern science and industry, and I can’t think of a more meaningful role for die cast products in that narrative than in the space program.

The idea that die cast products can be included in such an advanced effort as the space program is fascinating to me. It’s a reminder that the space program isn’t some miracle that just happened suddenly. Instead, it’s the culmination of science up to this point, and it includes, in direct and indirect ways, all of the technologies that we’ve developed up to this point: circuits and processors and semiconductors as well as metallurgy and craftsmanship and glassmaking. No technology is excluded; even seemingly simple technologies have contributed to what we have today, die casting included. Die cast products have a permanent place in the story of the development of science.