MakerBot 3D Printing Parts for the James Webb Space Telescope

You won't believe what John Camp and the rest of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center are creating for NASA with their MakerBot® Desktop 3D Printers. - Interested in learning more about MakerBot Desktop 3D Printers? Request more information here  .

Transcript

00:00:04 As the founder of the desktop 3D printing initiative here at the ATC, I was lucky enough to actually have my Replicator 2 in my cube with me and in the first quarter alone, I was able to print over 250 distinct parts for various programs and what you see here today for James Webb was just one of those programs. The James Webb Space Telescope is Nasa's biggest science mission ever. It's gonna be the largest space telescope that's ever been launched. So the pictures that we expect from James Webb will change our understanding of the universe and be much more spectacular than anything we've ever seen before. Having the MakerBot on our desktops has really allowed us to

00:00:41 bring rapid prototyping with the design cycle here at the Advanced Technology Center. We've used rapid prototyping for years but invariably, it involves outsourcing parts to machine shops. This allows us to quickly go from conceptual design to CAD model to 3D printed part. And to really see and measure how that part interacts with the real world and in the end, it allows us to produce better designs faster. In particular, 3D printing has really played a role here for us, allowing us to develop products up front, find potential mistakes, optimize very early in the

00:01:14 design process so that has been very very beneficial. James Webb Space telescope is going to operate a million-and-a-half kilometers away from earth so we use the MakerBot parts to test our processes to make sure that it was done right the first time. It also allowed us to work in parallel so while we were developing some of the parts that were gonna go into the instrument, the instrument itself was in a kryovacuum chamber and it was going along with its kryotesting while we were developing these prototypes with the MakerBot which allowed us as soon as the instrument came out of the kryovac chamber

00:01:49 to quickly and efficiently put these parts in very safely. One of the things that I really love about the MakerBot and 3D printing is that it enables you to make physical things fast and you know here at the Advanced Technology Center, everybody wants to be an inventor. When we first got our Replicator 2, word travelled fast that we had a 3D printer and engineers came out of the woodworks, knocking on my cube door, just hearing the rumors and asking if they could print something from the whimsical things to actual parts for a spacecraft, we have requests for everything and we were able to accommodate them all.

00:02:23 We're really just getting started with the MakerBots here in my lab. As I said, I was able to have the first of our Replicator 2's and now we've grown to three Replicators. We have about 10 people that use them on a regular basis and we're looking to expand to allow anyone at the Advanced Technology Center to have access to a MakerBot at any time they need it.