Space Travel Will Be Easier and Less Costly With 3-D Printers

Three-dimensional printing — or “additive manufacturing” — holds profound implications for the space industry. It’s the process of making an item by adding material in successive layers. Instead of ink, a variety of materials — from plastics to titanium — are used to create three-dimensional objects.

(NIRCam) for the James Webb Space Telescope, my colleagues and I found immediate advantages in using this technology. On spacecraft, the size, weight and fit of parts have a huge impact on performance. We used low-cost 3-D printers to develop rapid prototypes, which allowed us to go through many design iterations in days, not weeks or months.

We recently made titanium parts for ground support of flight hardware with additive manufacturing, quickly going from 3-D computer models and titanium powder to completed form in just a few hours. This is just the beginning, though. We’re at the cusp of a new age of manufacturing.