Freeform secures DIU contract to scale space hardware production

The U.S. Department of Defense Innovation Unit has awarded Freeform Future Corp. an agreement for a project called Adaptive Space Manufacturing and Integration at Scale, known as 10ⁿ. The deal will see Freeform apply commercial manufacturing technology to produce flight-qualified space hardware on demand, in a direct attempt to ease bottlenecks in the U.S. space supply chain.

Freeform will use its AI-native Skyfall platform to scale production of space components including propulsion and structural hardware. The 10ⁿ project was set up to address production rate and capacity limits in a supply chain historically built around low-volume, custom parts with long lead times.

Freeform said it will apply GPU-accelerated physics modeling, metal additive manufacturing and real-time process control to the work, and has set a target of reaching production volumes of hundreds to thousands of units annually, an economies-of-scale goal meant to move space hardware manufacturing beyond one-off, custom builds.

“The country needs production that moves at operational speed, and that is what we deliver,” said Erik Palitsch, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Freeform Future Corp.

One of the further effects of the contract should be to support advancement of the space industry’s manufacturing readiness level, a scale used to assess how ready a production process is for consistent, qualified output. Freeform described an iterative Design-Build-Test and Validate/Qualify process intended to produce resilient, cost-effective and commercially viable hardware, while at the same time maintaining U.S. technological leadership in space.