Nearly five years have passed since the world came to a standstill due to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), but global supply chains have yet to fully recover. Specialty industries such as space travel were particularly hard hit because it was impossible to go to the street corner to pick up spare parts for rockets.
The industry has begun to look long and hard at 3D printing as a solution to these problems. What additive manufacturing lacks in scale, it makes up for in both the creation of specialized parts and the decentralization of manufacturing, which is highly concentrated in a few locations around the world.
Oluseun Taiwo, co-founder and CEO of Solideon, saw firsthand the havoc that such global events can wreak on the space industry. He was employed as a propulsion engineer in Virgin Orbit's additive manufacturing division in May 2020, when the company's LauncherOne rocket failed to launch. Virgin Orbit's journey ended in May 2023.
“What I saw then was that if we had localized manufacturing methods and didn't have to rely on a global supply chain during a global pandemic, the company would have fared much better. ,” Taiwo told TechCrunch. “For our business model to work, we needed to build about 30 rockets a year, which was a huge deal. We were doing about three jobs a year, but it was never enough. There wasn't.”
Taiwo left Virgin Orbit in 2021 to work for 3D printing powerhouse 3D Systems, and founded Solideon at Techstars the following year. The Bay Area-based rocket printing service has raised $6.5 million in funding to date. Given the company's sky-high ambitions, this is just the beginning. Solideon presented on stage today as part of Disrupt SF's Startup Battlefield 20.
“What we're really doing is building robots for deployable microfactories that help 3D print and assemble large-scale aerospace structures and products,” Taiwo says.
Image credit: Solideon
“It's important because it decentralizes manufacturing and allows us to actually get closer to building an entire product without human intervention in the loop. Our long-term goal is to be able to do it anywhere in the solar system, at any time. It’s about making it happen.”
Of course, manufacturing for space is still a long way off. In the meantime, the company is focusing on solving more immediate problems, with an eye on defense contracts. Taiwo notes that the US Department of Defense is currently auditing its own supply chain in anticipation of further disruptions, whether from natural disasters or global conflicts.
“The Navy has a problem with very expensive assets,” he says. “In the short term, it's about helping them solve that problem. What we're more focused on in the medium term is smaller, autonomous, attributable systems. Here , we will see the biggest deployment of such technologies: building highly mobile microfactories that can operate close to where conflict situations change and adapt accordingly.”