SpaceX’s twitter feed posted a picture of their SuperDraco engine that is being used for the crew escape system for their Dragon capsule.

The triangular features on the combustion chambers caught my eye. Zooming in to take a closer look, it was clear that the chambers were 3D printed. Pretty cool. A quick check of the internet revealed that the 3D printing community was already well aware of this. The parts are printed Inconel.

A couple of other thoughts:

  • My excitement for this is a little dampened by the fact that this part is for the crew escape vehicle. Because of this, the part only has to work once. One of the challenges to proliferating 3D printed parts into actual parts for customers in the jet industry is showing that the fatigue properties of the printed parts are understood and acceptable. It doesn’t appear that Space X had to worry about this in this case as it is not on one of its reusable rockets.

  • Beside the 3D printing manufacturing, it appears that Space X took advantage of the capabilities of 3D printing to design a part with topological optimization. That’s neat to see.