Fortunately for those who rely on National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (Nadcap) welding using argon, a 2018 shortage in that supply of gas appears to be over.
Axenics, a contract manufacturing company based in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, utilizes an abundance of argon in high-purity orbital welding. Axenics’ supplier of argon has assured that while “things were tight” during hurricane season with the shut-down of some plants in 2018, there are huge amounts of the gas readily available for the foreseeable future.
And that is also good news for the ongoing efforts to see humans arrive on planet Mars. In November 2018, NASA landed the InSight rover spacecraft on the red planet in an effort to get a deeper understanding of Mars’ core. That mission is slated to continue into 2020. At the annual Humans to Mars summit held in spring 2018, speculation continued that it may be mid-2033 when humans actually step foot on Mars. It will be during that period of time when Earth and Mars are closer together, easing the prospects of human travel to the distant planet.
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