Mesa, Arizona, July 22, 2024 – Rosotics, a metal additive manufacturing startup based in Mesa, AZ announced this week Halo, an additive manufacturing and industrial intelligence platform to serve the aerospace, naval, and defense sectors. In an exclusive for TechCrunch, founder and CEO Christian LaRosa detailed the company’s intent in development to utilize the platform for the mass production of heavyweight infrastructure in low-earth orbit – a closely guarded project the company has kept under wraps until today.
“This was perhaps our best held secret. Monarch was known not even by the engineers working on Halo, only the requirements and the envelopes to design against. We often had employees ask us about the design objectives, because they seemed odd for a metal 3D printer. We frequently changed the name of the project, and containerized parts of it off under the names of other new projects so it could not be traced back to the whole picture. By 2022, the number of people globally who knew the full scope was maybe three or four.”
Since inception the company, backed by Tim Draper and scouted by both Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), has deployed only $2.6 million in funding to reinvent the field of large-scale metal 3D printing. While conservative in comparison to names such as Relativity Space, the company has managed to develop and deploy to market a highly energy-efficient process it terms as Mjolnir described as “the most advanced, complex metal additive process ever devised” by means of a hardware platform capable of printing in metric tons, and able to reduce the carbon footprint per 500 kg of deposited mass by 86.74% versus WAAM, a common form of additive.
LaRosa described this approach as strategic – spend little, and play the long game without much fanfare. That is also why the founding team decided to locate their operation outside of typical hubs for aerospace. “we had to keep a low profile, but enough of a profile, for our major plans – these would take years. Not only that, we’d need the cash flow of the platform and the print heritage to complete those plans rather than just investment”. The performance of that platform has left a positive impression on many in the field, including Jim Cantrell, who served on the founding team of SpaceX and personally as Elon Musk’s early mentor. The hardware is “ideal for the industrial-scale production of things like rocket tanks, we’ll be buying one of their machines” said Cantrell. However, according to LaRosa, the platform is to serve far-reaching tasks for the company that stretch beyond just commercial markets.
A paramount objective of the platform, described for the first time, is to directly mass produce for Rosotics what the company terms as ‘carrier vessels’, heavyweight vehicles sized at five-meters in diameter for the orbital regime that are designed to carry numerous smaller spacecraft, which the company has been developing for years under a highly secret program called Monarch. Each mothership, sized for the payload fairing of SpaceX’s Starship, would deliver and maintain sixteen of the R2 – an autonomous spacecraft for the on-orbit manufacturing and assembly of enormous metal structures in LEO. The R2, which LaRosa described as “reliant on the mothership and a proximity workhorse”, would be operated to construct from aluminum an orbital shipyard referred to in mission planning as ‘station’ using a novel approach illustrated as distinct from conventional welding. Each carrier vessel would be resupplied with resource by smaller launch providers by means of rendezvous in orbit, and LaRosa further described the vessels as capable of station-keeping to deep space or at the L-5 earth-moon lagrange point. Station, as detailed, would serve as an interim propellant depot and orbital shipyard of which the R2 would construct in its entirety, by primary structure, flat and conformal truss, annular segments, and secondary structure. LaRosa declined to comment on timeframes, but noted the company is currently in mission planning stages, as well as mature development. The project was initiated in early 2021, originally upon a discovery related to the underlying welding approach, which led the company to radically lean into power efficiency and bet the company on induction – far more heavily than others in the field. LaRosa however noted the methods used on Halo aren’t translated, and that R2 utilizes a separate architecture it refers to as “Reaper”.
“We are sourcing dozens of Halo printers internally for this project alongside sending them to customers” said Christian. “We were successful in designing it as well for the production demands of the carrier ship and the R2, which cannot be built or serviced using any conventional means of additive. This is primarily because of how the thermals work and the power footprint. We’ve seen promising results in R2 preliminaries and know it well, though I will make clear the way it will produce station will not have any traceability to what you may picture as welding in space. It is the same, but it is eerily different.”
While Halo deliveries are set to begin on August 26, 2024 within the United States and Europe, LaRosa noted the time to spacecraft qualification and acceptance testing for the project was likely in the 12-18 month range. The company currently is headquartered in Mesa, AZ, and noted it will be establishing a dedicated spacecraft production site in Boulder, CO, within which it will install a large number of Halo printers for production and assembly. The company also is stancing offices in San Diego, CA for its naval production efforts.
Press Contact:
Mike Wehner
920-251-6084
Comments