I’m in the middle of reading a book about Elon Musk, written by Ashlee Vance. Fascinating book in a lot of different ways. Of course, Elon Musk’s name is associated with PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
On page 257 there is a description of a spacecraft called the Dragon 2 which will be able to dock with the International Space Station without the intervention of robotic arms. It will run on a “SuperDraco” engine, a thruster made by SpaceX. And, get this…it will be “the first engine ever built completely by a 3-D printer to go into space. This means that a machine guided by a computer formed the engine out of a single piece of metal – in this case the high-strength alloy Inconel – so that its strength and performance should exceed anything built by humans by welding various parts together.”
Wow. That is kind of mind blowing. I guess some industries see some advantage to using 3-D printing.