The fuel tanks on Space Shuttle Discovery launched by NASA in June 1998 were four tons lighter than before, because they were made with a new alloy, aluminum-lithium. The alloy was crafted using a machine tool manufactured by Matsuura Machinery Corporation of Japan.

Matsuura makes machine tools in the city of Fukui, and exports about 80% of its products to Europe and North America. It also supplies U.S. aerospace equipment manufacturers. NASA recognized the company's past expertise and asked it to make a new type of fuel tank.

Matsuura Masanori, the company president, explains, "Aluminum-lithium retains its strength even when used to make thin, light products. Before we developed the new machine tool, heat caused by friction would change the shape of the alloy during machining, making it impossible to trim the alloy properly. Our new machining center uses super high-speed revolutions to avoid this problem and ensure precision cutting."

The machining center is a machine tool equipped with dozens of attachments to cut, trim and drill materials like iron and aluminum. One machining center can handle all of these jobs. Conventional high-speed machining centers operate at about 25,000 revolutions per minute (rpm), but the one made by Matsuura triples this speed to 75,000 rpm. Because of this super high speed, the job is finished before the friction heat rises high enough to distort the material. The key to processing the new alloy was development of a new main shaft capable of withstanding the super-fast revolutions.

High-speed processing technology, which has been studied since the latter part of the 1970s, now supports space development projects from behind the scenes.