If anyone is looking to get in on the ground floor of a welding career, the Navy and their contractors have stood up buildsubmarines.com.
Apparently it's a large effort to recruit 100,000(!!) trades people, of all sorts, for a very large effort to build a lot of submarines.
And one thing they certainly need is welders. And they're training.
The opening video even has a female welder in it.
It's more of a grand assembly endeavor than a grand engineering endeavor (like the Apollo program was), but I know my time in the defense industry (supporting naval weapon systems: Standard Missile, Phalanx, RAM, etc.) was an interesting time. I've built enough software systems from seed that grew, flourished, and died with a simple `rm` command to know it can be interesting to point at a big metal hole in the water and say "I helped build that".