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Nearly five years after the world came to a halt due to COVID-19, the global supply chain still has not fully recovered. Specialized industries such as space travel were particularly affected, given the impossibility of heading to the corner to pick up rocket spare parts.
Industries are starting to take a long, hard look at 3D printing as a solution to such problems. What additive manufacturing lacks in scale, it makes up for in creating specialized parts and decentralizing a manufacturing industry that is highly concentrated in a few locations around the world.
Solidion Co-Founder and CEO Oluseun Taiwo has seen firsthand the devastation such global events can wreak on the space industry. He was working as a propulsion engineer in Virgin Orbit’s additive manufacturing division in May 2020, when the company failed to launch its LauncherOne rocket. Virgin Orbit’s flight will end in May 2023.
“What I saw at the time was that if we had a local way of manufacturing and didn’t have to rely on the global supply chain during the global pandemic, the company would have done better,” Tayo tells TechCrunch. “There was the difficulty of needing to build approximately 30 rockets a year for the business model to work. We were doing three exercises a year, which was never good enough.
Taiwo left Virgin Orbit in 2021 to work at 3D printing powerhouse 3D Systems in 2021, before founding Solideon at Techstars the following year. The Bay Area-based rocket printing service has raised $6.5 million in funding to date. It’s just the beginning, given the company’s sky-high ambitions. Solideon was presented on stage today as part of Startup Battlefield 20 at Disrupt SF.
“What we’re really doing is building small, deployable factory robots that help with 3D printing and assembling large aerospace structures and products,” Taiwo says.
“The important reason is that you can decentralize manufacturing and actually get close to building a complete product without any human intervention in the loop. Our long-term goal is to do this anywhere in the solar system at any time.”
Manufacturing for space in space is still a long way off, of course. In the meantime, the company is focusing on solving more immediate problems, with an emphasis on defense contracts. Tayo notes that the US Department of Defense is currently reviewing its supply chain, in anticipation of further disruption – whether that be a natural disaster or global conflict.
“The Navy has a problem with expensive assets,” he says. “The short term is going to help them solve this problem. The medium term we’re focusing more on is smaller, autonomous, traceable systems. And that’s where we see the biggest play for technology like this. Building a small factory that is very mobile and works close to the scene.” Be sensitive to conflict and be able to adapt appropriately.
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