America’s most advanced metal 3D printer uses 12 lasers to mass-produce rocket frames
SMRTR summary
A metal 3D printer standing over eight stories tall, equipped with a dozen high-powered lasers, is now at the heart of a major U.S. defense manufacturing push.
California-based Divergent Technologies has unveiled the Monolith One, a massive industrial additive manufacturing system built not for prototyping, but for serious, high-volume production. The machine took more than two years to develop and can roughly double production throughput compared to current equipment.
The company is now building a 430,000-square-foot facility in Long Beach, where 64 of these printers will eventually manufacture tens of thousands of munition airframes annually, along with hundreds of thousands of aerospace and defense components.
It's a significant bet on domestic manufacturing at a moment when defense contractors are urgently seeking faster, more resilient supply chains. Divergent already supplies structures to Lockheed Martin and RTX, and says its software-driven approach can compress production timelines from months down to days.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Interesting Engineering.
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