America Makes Awards $4M to Ursa Major to Qualify 3D Printed Copper Rocket Engines

In the third phase of a partnership that started in 2021, America Makes, the Manufacturing USA institute based in Youngstown, Ohio, has awarded $4 million to Colorado’s Ursa Major Technologies, a specialist in deploying additive manufacturing (AM) to produce a range of both liquid and solid rocket engines. Following up on two previous contracts, Ursa Major will move towards producing flight-qualified thrust chambers out of copper-chrome-niobium alloy GrCop-42 for its Hadley and Draper engines.

Ursa Major will produce the components for two America Makes customers, the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) — the nonprofit that manages America Makes — and the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The whole investment totals $5 million, with Ursa Major investing the remaining $1 million.

Ursa Major will use some of the funding to purchase a Velo3D Sapphire XC printer, which will be installed at the company’s AM facility in Youngstown. In March 2024, Ursa Major achieved a major milestone with the Hadley engine, successfully launching it on its first test flight.

In a press release, the Executive Director of America Makes, John Wilczynski, said, “Ursa Major continues to be at the forefront of implementing [AM] in aerospace and defense programs. We are excited to partner with Ursa Major in demonstrating the impact [AM] can have in solving supply chain and manufacturing challenges within our defense industrial base.”

Chief Operations Officer for Ursa Major, Nick Doucette, said, “America Makes has been a trusted partner for the past three years, allowing Ursa Major to create high-quality and scalable systems in our Advanced Manufacturing Lab in Youngstown, Ohio. This next step will establish Ursa Major as a scalable and trusted manufacturing partner in the defense and aerospace sector while maturing production readiness for our Draper and Hadley rocket engines.”

As I more or less always mention when I’m writing about Ursa Major, the company’s significance doesn’t lie solely in its ability to 3D print rocket engines. Just as significantly, it’s an exemplary case of how the Department of Defense (DoD) is refining its approach to organizational learning in order to meet the demands of 21st century supply chain management. It’s not too much to expect that, in the years ahead, DoD will be applying the lessons it has learned from its work with Ursa Major to emerging companies across the defense industrial base.

The most notable angle to this latest development in particular might be the company’s purchase of the Sapphire XC. While Ursa Major has been an important customer of Velo3D’s for years, this latest purchase comes at a time when things aren’t going so well for Velo3D.

This raises some interesting questions about what the potential failure of companies like Velo3D would do to the DoD’s efforts to reshore American manufacturing supply chains. While Velo3D is just one company, there are no doubt many other US companies that must be in similar positions. This presents a scenario where some of the biggest AM success stories — like 3D printed rocket motors — are largely the result of enterprises representing the AM industry’s worst struggles in recent years.

With all that in mind, Stifel Financial’s recent announcement that it has received final federal approval for the AM-Forward Fund becomes all the more crucial. It may be too little, too late for companies that have already been on the scene for a while, but perhaps it can at least put a hard limit on the vicious cycles from the past repeating themselves in the future.