We already know flights aboard Boeing's Starliner spaceship will be comfortable and have a bit of flair, so it's only natural that the ships themselves will have futuristic parts, many of them fabricated in 3D printers.
Approximately 600 of those parts will be spit out of 3D printers in a small factory in Connecticut—everything from propulsion system brackets to structures for the air revitalization system, Reuters reports. While 3D printing has been used for aerospace parts before, including on fighter jets, the Starliner project represents one of the first times that production parts for space vehicles will be printed.
The company behind the effort is Oxford Performance Materials, and its custom plastic parts can handle temperatures from minus 300 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. They're mostly made up of a proprietary poly-ether-ketone-ketone formula that Oxford refers to as OXPEKK, and they'll offer Boeing weight savings of about 60 percent compared with traditional manufacturing.
The machines that create the parts are a bit more complicated than the 3D printer you might be eyeing to print out odds and ends around your house. They use lasers to melt the plastic, giving it the isotropy (physics talk for extreme purity) that's required to withstand the rigors of spaceflight.
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"What really makes it valuable to NASA and Boeing is this material is as strong as aluminum at significantly less weight," Oxford aerospace president Larry Varholak told Reuters.
Boeing received a $4.2 billion contract to build three Starliner capsules, and flight tests are set to begin next year. Elon Musk's SpaceX is also building a similar capsule for the space agency, thanks to a contract worth $2.6 billion.
The ships are designed to accommodate seven passengers, or a mix of crew and cargo, for missions to low-Earth orbit, including the International Space Station. Each Starliner capsule can be used up to 10 times before it's retired—for those keeping a tally, that works out to a little more than $200 million per flight.