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 in Huntsville, Alabama 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.