Amendment 37: DRAFT F.11 Stand-Alone Landing Site-Agnostic Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon released for community comment.
The graphic captures additive manufacturing technology milestones led by the RAMPT project. Using 3D-printed, liquid oxygen/hydrogen thrust chamber hardware at chamber pressures of up to 1,400 pounds per square inch, Marshall engineers have completed 12 hot-fire tests totaling a combined 330 seconds. The project also has delivered composite materials demonstrating a 40% weight savings over conventional bimetallic combustion chambers.
Tyler Gibson, left, and Allison Clark, RAMPT engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, inspect an additively manufactured composite overwrap thrust chamber assembly. Conventional rocket hardware may require more than 1,000 or more individually joined parts. Additive manufacturing permits engineers to print these channels in novel alloys as a single piece with multiple alloys, dramatically reducing manufacturing time.
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.