HUNTSVILLE — The widespread commercial adoption of additive manufacturing technologies, commonly known as 3D printing, is no surprise to design engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, whose research created stronger, lighter weight materials and new manufacturing processes to make rocket parts.
NASA’s RAMPT (Rapid Analysis and Manufacturing Propulsion Technology) project is on the cutting-edge of additive manufacturing – helping the agency and industry produce new alloys and additively manufactured parts, commonly referred to as 3D printing, according to Paul Gradl, the project’s co-principal investigator at NASA Marshall.
“Across NASA’s storied legacy of vehicle and hardware design, testing, and integration, our underlying strength is in our application of extremely durable and severe environment materials and innovative manufacturing for component design,” said Gradl. “We strive to fully understand the microstructure and properties of every material and how they will ultimately be used in components before we make them available to industry for flight applications.”
The same principle applies to additive manufacturing, the meticulous process of building components and hardware one layer of material at a time.
“The RAMPT project’s goal is to support commercial, technical readiness, enabling our industry partners to meet the challenges inherent in building new generations of safer, more cost-effective deep space exploration propulsion systems,” said John Fikes, RAMPT project manager.
Since its inception, RAMPT has conducted 500 test-firings of 3D-printed injectors, nozzles, and chamber hardware totaling more than 16,000 seconds, using newly developed extreme-environment alloys, large-scale additive manufacturing processes, and advanced composite technology. The project has also started developing a full-scale version for the workhorse RS-25 engine – which experts say could reduce its costs by up to 70% and cut manufacturing time in half.
As printed structures are getting bigger and more complex, a major area of interest is the additive manufacturing print scale. A decade ago, most 3D-printed parts were no bigger than a shoebox. Today, additive manufacturing researchers are helping the industry produce lighter, more robust, intricately designed rocket engine components 10-feet tall and eight-feet in diameter.
NASA’s strategy to encourage commercial and academic buy-in is to offer public-private partnership opportunities, wherein industry and academia contribute as much as 25% of project development costs, allowing them to reap the benefits.
For example, NASA successfully delivered a refined version of an alloy, known as GRCop42, created at NASA Glenn nearly 40 years ago which helped commercial launch provider, Relativity Space, launch the first fully 3D-printed rocket in March 2023.
“Our primary goal with these higher-performance alloys is to prove them in a rocket engine test-fire environment and then hand them off to enable commercial providers to build hardware, fly launch vehicles, and foster a thriving space infrastructure with real scientific, social, and economic rewards,” Gradl said.
A key benefit of additive manufacturing hardware development is radically reducing the “design-fail-fix” cycle – when engineers develop new hardware, ground-test it to failure to determine the hardware’s design limits under all possible conditions and then tweak accordingly. That capability is increasingly important with the creation of new alloys and designs, new processing techniques, and the introduction of composite overwraps and other innovations.
Fikes said, “Ten years from now, we may be building rocket engines – or rockets themselves – out of entirely new materials, employing all-new processing and fabrication techniques. NASA is central to all of that.”
The RAMPT project continues to progress and receive recognition from NASA and industry partners. On July 31, the RAMPT team was awarded NASA’s 2024 Invention of The Year award for its excellence and contributions to NASA and the commercial industry’s deep space exploration goals.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville leads RAMPT, with key support among engineers and technologists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland; Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.; Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; and Auburn University, plus contributions from other academic partners and industry contractors.
RAMPT is funded by NASA’s Game Changing Development Program within the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
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