III. Metallurgy: The proposed French metallurgy programme for Spacelab

Abstract

The call for ideas for the first Spacelab payload issued from the European Space Agency (E.S.A.) obtained in France a fairly high level of success from the government agencies but almost no answers from the industrial community. This situation, which arose despite knowledge of some early but very promising results of the first space experiments, seems to be correlated with the absence of any guarantee about the future Law of Space, and consequently has orientated the French metallurgy experiments to more academic and less applied speculations. We shall describe the actions of the French Space Agency (C.N.E.S.) to decide which experiments would be officially supported by C.N.E.S. if accepted by E.S.A. In the particular field of metallurgy, six proposals were so selected which have been proposed to E.S.A. for the first Spacelab payload. We shall present the arguments which defended those proposals and as a function of the preliminary analysis of some similar U.S. experiments we shall try to detect some of the possible difficulties in performing them and to foresee the main results which we expect. Special emphasis will be laid on the thermodiffusion and nucleation experiments, the study of which is basic for many crystal growth or metallurgy experiments in a zero-gravity environment.