---
title: "How NASA JPL keeps skyrocketing AM into the future"
url: https://www.voxelmatters.com/how-jpl-keeps-skyrocketing-am-into-the-future/
date: 2025-03-17
modified: 2025-03-17
lang: en
author: "Davide Sher"
description: "Interviewing keynote speakers for the upcoming AMUG Conference is one of the highlights of VoxelMatters' editorial year. It is a welcome benefit of our media partnership with the World's most..."
categories:
  - "3D Modeling"
  - "3D Printing Processes"
  - "Aerospace AM"
  - "AM for Space"
  - "AM Software"
  - "Decision Makers"
  - "DfAM"
  - "Executive Interviews"
  - "Metal Additive Manufacturing"
  - "Topology Optmization"
tags:
  - "Featured"
image: https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NASA_JPL_image001-640x360.jpg
word_count: 2863
---

# How NASA JPL keeps skyrocketing AM into the future

Interviewing keynote speakers for the upcoming AMUG Conference is one of the highlights of VoxelMatters' editorial year. It is a welcome benefit of our media partnership with the World's most important conference for additive manufacturing industry professionals. Every year we learn about incredible AM applications that push the limits of what's possible. However, this year we may be going farther than ever before, as we get to speak with Dr. Ryan T. Watkins, one of the minds behind [NASA JPL](https://www.voxelmatters.directory/company/nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory-nasa-jpl/)'s most advanced AM innovations and applications.

It's not an easy time for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the organization that helped lift America into the Space Age in 1958 with the Explorer I satellite. Since then, JPL spacecraft have flown to every planet in the solar system, the Sun, and into interstellar space to understand better the universe's origins and the origins of life. [Recent budget cuts](https://www.voxelmatters.com/nasa-jpl-lays-off-530-due-to-budget-cuts/), coupled with the dramatic LA fires, have made the last few months some of the hardest for many JPL scientists and engineers, however, the organization remains at the forefront of innovation, on Earth and in Space.

![](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RyanTWatkins-scaled.jpg)Dr. Ryan T. Watkins, Research Engineer at NASA JPL.

AM is a key enabler of this innovation for many of JPL's projects and, as Research Engineer, Dr. Watkins is directly involved in most of these successful efforts. At JPL, he specializes in integrating advanced materials with computational design to support future space missions. His expertise lies in topology optimization, additive manufacturing, and the experimental and theoretical study of shape memory alloys.

After earning his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2015, Ryan joined JPL, contributing to major flight projects as a Structural Analyst and Cognizant Engineer. He was key in designing, building, testing, and integrating launch restraint hardware for critical missions such as the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) and NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR).

He also works on modeling and 3D printing lattice structures to enhance spacecraft performance. As the lead developer of UnitcellHub, a pioneering lattice simulation and design tool, he has advanced computational design within JPL, earning recognition as a finalist in JPL’s Software of the Year competition. Beyond his research, Ryan is committed to fostering JPL’s expertise in topology optimization, mentoring new engineers, and integrating cutting-edge computational tools into flight projects. His work continues to push the boundaries of material science and structural engineering for future space exploration.

## From Mars to AMUG 2025

One of the key projects Dr. Watkins is working on is the Mars Sample Return Mission (MSR), a NASA and European Space Agency mission focused on returning samples of the Martian surface to Earth for in-depth scientific study. This mission began engineering development in the early 2020s but was recently paused to reformulate the mission architecture to meet this challenging engineering problem better. "As such," Dr. Watkins clarifies, "the exact details of the mission profile are uncertain right now, and everything I state here is related to the original architecture and is subject to change in the future."

![Discover how NASA JPL is pushing additive manufacturing boundaries. Insights from Dr. Ryan T. Watkins await at the AMUG Conference.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Mars-Sample-16x9-Core-8-Atsah-03132022-scaled-e1741680390331.jpg)A NASA image of Martian terrain.

In the original mission architecture, the final leg of the mission consisted of the spacecraft containing the Martian samples hard landing on the surface of the Earth without the benefit of parachutes or a powered descent, corresponding to an Earth impact velocity of around 50 m/s (112 mph). "This Earth Entry Vehicle was outfitted with various energy absorption mechanisms to protect the samples, one of which consisted of a 3D printed titanium lattice acting as the last line of protection for the sample," Dr. Watkins explains. "I was the research lead for this lattice structure, acting as the principal investigator for the early research into this new technology starting in 2020 and the primary subject matter expert on the technology when the MSR mission adopted it.

"As a research engineer at JPL, I use my background in mechanics and materials to link advanced manufacturing with advanced design. This crushable lattice project was the perfect synergy of this approach, requiring extensive manufacturing and engineering design developments to make them possible. This development, including the initial investigation and its infusion into a flagship NASA mission, is the story I will tell at the AMUG conference this Spring."

NASA spacecraft commonly experience high-energy shocks, including launch vehicle separations, abort conditions, spacecraft deployments, and landing events on planetary bodies. Metal foams and honeycombs have conventionally been used in these applications, utilizing their ability to crush under load to dissipate energy. AM lattices are a natural extension to this approach, providing greater design flexibility and the ability to directly conform to the spacecraft geometry while integrating features like mounting holes and threaded interfaces. Additionally, unlike conventional foams and honeycombs, which can typically only be manufactured in aluminum, AM provides a much wider array of material choices. Beyond Martian sample protection, AM lattices are currently being considered for use in pyrotechnically actuated release mechanisms and within spacecraft landing legs.

![Discover how NASA JPL is pushing additive manufacturing boundaries. Insights from Dr. Ryan T. Watkins await at the AMUG Conference.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NASA_JPL_image002.jpg)The crushable lattice concept for MSR.

## Getting AM to fly

To date, JPL has flown [eleven metal 3D printed parts on the Perseverance rover (which landed on Mars in 2021)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/perseverance-rover-3d-printed-metal-parts/), one metal part on the [Europa Clipper mission](https://www.voxelmatters.com/nasas-europa-clipper-to-feature-3d-printed-topology-optimized-bracket/) (which launched in the Fall of 2024), and approximately fifty polymeric parts on the upcoming SPHEREx mission (which is due to launch late Winter of 2025). There have been a few other instances of 3D printed parts designed and built by JPL (the earliest being in 1999), but this covers most of them in the modern additive manufacturing (AM) area.

"In my 9 years at JPL," Ryan explains, "I've designed approximately 80 parts for production across four NASA missions. Of these parts, only two of them have been 3D printed. In many ways, this highlights the challenges of introducing new technology into NASA missions, where the tolerance for failure is extremely low: most space missions take nearly a decade from concept to operation, and there's usually only one opportunity to get it right. We are at a turning point and expect AM to become more mainstream in our upcoming missions."

One of the elements that drives the use of AM is topology optimization, which can improve the spacecraft's performance and decrease the design time and cost. "I believe topology optimization is the future of design" Watkins continues. "Intuitively, the most obvious benefit is the ability to reduce spacecraft mass: launch vehicles and spacecraft have limited capacity to escape Earth's gravity and propel them to their final destination. What is often overlooked is the potential for topology optimization to reduce engineering design time. Unlike many industries where engineering time is a fraction of product life cycle cost, engineering time is one of the primary drivers for NASA mission cost due to the bespoke nature of each spacecraft. Design optimization thus has a unique role in bringing down future spacecraft design time and cost."

## A spacetime before AM

Much of mechanical engineering has historically been driven by engineering intuition that is then supported and verified by analysis and tests. In the aerospace industry and NASA as an organization, this intuition is used in conjunction with past mission heritage to guide the design of future missions. The design paradigm has remained relatively unchanged even as CNC machining and 5-axis milling have matured. It wasn't until AM, in conjunction with advances in computation resources, that we began to step back and consider the opportunities available with computation design tools like topology optimization.

"Progress in the AM industry has been tremendous since I started at JPL in 2015," Dr. Watkins recalls. "I still remember the early challenges of simply getting fully dense metal parts and the many discussions about the appropriate way to qualify AM materials for production. Anyone considering AM was heavily scrutinized for their rationale and often told that it couldn't be used. There was a muddled balance of excitement for the technology's potential and fear of everything that could go wrong. Today, a NASA standard ([NASA-STD-6030](https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-6030)) specifies the steps required for material qualification. Our own printers are fully qualified for spacecraft missions, and there are metal 3D printed parts on the surface of Mars. We still have a long way to go, but significant progress has been made."

AM technologies have evolved but Dr. Watkins also highlights that progress in AM software has been just as remarkable as, and just as necessary as, the improvements in the hardware technology. In 2015, the software landscape for AM was minimal, with only a handful of commercially available tools. Many solutions were either in their infancy or adapted from traditional manufacturing workflows, requiring significant expertise to achieve manufacturable designs. Only a few dominant players—OptiStruct, GENESIS, and TOSCA—offered commercially available topology optimization solutions and required substantial expertise.

Meanwhile, in the CAD space, AM-focused software like nTop was just being founded and AM process simulation tools were rudimentary or unavailable. Fast forward to today, and the software landscape looks entirely different. Topology optimization is now a standard feature in nearly every major Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) suite, with more advanced manufacturing constraints—such as AM overhang angle considerations—enabling more practical and manufacturable designs. On the CAD side, nTop has become a mainstream tool, complementing the enhanced AM capabilities now integrated into traditional CAD platforms.  These advancements have significantly lowered the barrier to entry, enabling more efficient design workflows and reducing trial-and-error in the AM development process.

## The UnitcellHub piece of the puzzle

Lattice structures have been a part of the engineering design toolbox for decades; however, manufacturing has limited the application space to foams and honeycombs. "With AM," Dr. Watkins explains, "the design space has expanded greatly; unfortunately, these are very complicated structures that are challenging to model and design, which has become the limiting factor. UnitcellHub is the first step to bridging this gap by giving engineers a place to start the lattice design process. Ultimately, my goal is to provide a tool that can be used out of the box to solve real problems now and provide a framework for the lattice community to expand this capability and push into the design capabilities we have yet to imagine."

![Discover how NASA JPL is pushing additive manufacturing boundaries. Insights from Dr. Ryan T. Watkins await at the AMUG Conference.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NASA_JPL_Unknown.jpg)An image conceptualizing the UnitCell Hub software.

UnitcellHub is focused on designing lattice structures for targeted engineering applications; that is, what lattice should you choose for your specific application? In contrast, commercial software like nTop and other CAD platforms have focused more on creating raw lattice geometry (a hard but separate challenge) and less on the design philosophy. In the past few years, more design-focused tools have entered the market, including LatticeRobot, General Lattice, and Metafold3D, which are more comparable in scope to UnitcellHub.

In addition, the software is fully open source. The GitHub repositories can be accessed [here,](https://github.com/unitcellhub) and the web app for UnitcellApp (a subcomponent of UnitcellHub) can be downloaded [here](https://www.unitcellapp.org/).

![Discover how NASA JPL is pushing additive manufacturing boundaries. Insights from Dr. Ryan T. Watkins await at the AMUG Conference.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/explore.jpg)At the same time, Dr. Watkins is well aware of recent progress in computational engineering. "Computational design, where computers generate designs rather than just verifying them, is the future of engineering design," he argues. "Although engineering intuition has been able to tackle extremely challenging design problems, it is a slow process due to its inherently manual and iterative nature. Furthermore, it usually silos expertise, limiting our ability to create novel multi-functional designs. Computational design overcomes these limitations, coupling physics simulations, big data, and mathematical optimization to generate high-performance designs rapidly. My hope for the future is that computational design will transform engineering design as CAD did in the 1980s through the 2000s, pushing us into a design paradigm where engineers can rapidly create new and innovative solutions to humanity's many challenging problems."

## Out of this (AM) world

Watkins concedes that although the AM industry has made great strides, it still faces several challenges to achieving mainstream adoption. Among other things, Dr. Watkins says, "One of the limitations I've run into is the print volume and feature resolution of current technologies, which severely limit the application space. We need the ability to manufacture meter-scale parts with millimeter resolution." He adds that we also need process modeling simulation that is accurate, fast, and interpretable. "There are still too many instances where builds fail due to uncertainty in the interplay between part geometry and thermally induced defects. Process simulation has come a long way, but is often challenging to interpret or too slow for practical use."

Another challenge is handling complex geometry in CAD and analysis. "[This] is still cumbersome and a niche capability," he says. We need a better interplay between conventional solid body CAD representations and implicit geometric modeling, such as what is used in nTop. They each have their benefits, and a hybrid approach that allows these geometric forms to talk to each other across different software platforms is essential.

![Discover how NASA JPL is pushing additive manufacturing boundaries. Insights from Dr. Ryan T. Watkins await at the AMUG Conference.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Artemis-E-Pump-machined-and-active-e1741681864966.jpg)Masten Space Systems successfully demonstrated an e-pump printed by Elementum 3D out of their commercially available A6061-RAM2 alloy. This is a significant milestone toward developing a compact, high-power density, high performance electric pump. The electric fuel pump is designed by Masten Space Systems and P3 Technologies for the NASA Artemis program to help humans return to the moon

Just because we can make a complex geometric form doesn't mean we have the supporting tools necessary to model and qualify it," Dr. Wakins says, pointing out that "a great example of this is lattice structures. Due to the intricacy of their geometry, it is challenging to simulate their performance. Furthermore, the geometry is hard to inspect even with tools like computed tomography (CT scanning). The added complexity is too cumbersome to implement practically without ways to overcome these challenges.

As a Materials Development Technologist, Dr. Watkins is also acutely aware of the challenges of sourcing the ideal materials for some of the world's most demanding applications. The good news is that he finds that many of these have been addressed today and the AM process remains the most complex challenge to face.

"In the early days – he says– it was a combination of the materials availability and the AM processes. Aerospace heavily relies on aluminum and titanium alloys for metallic structures. Titanium is one of the most researched AM materials and has generally been an easy material to print, allowing us to use chemistries that we're familiar with, such as Ti 6Al 4V. Aluminum is a different story though. Due to the poor weldability of commonly used aerospace aluminum alloys (such as Al 6061), early AM-focused development on lower strength casting alloys. Even though these materials were printable, the benefits gained by AM were lost by the reduction in material performance. Material selection became less limiting until the recent advances in high-strength aluminum AM alloys (such as Al 6061 RAM2 from [Elementum3D](https://www.voxelmatters.directory/company/elementum3d/)). Engineers will always want more from materials, but the bigger challenges for AM are related to build volume, feature resolution, probability of build success..."

![Discover how NASA JPL is pushing additive manufacturing boundaries. Insights from Dr. Ryan T. Watkins await at the AMUG Conference.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Fabrisonic-NASA-JPL-part-e1534506288415.jpg)One of the UAM parts that Fabrisonic produced for NASA JPL

## Beyond PBF

In the context of near-term applications for spacecraft, Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) remains the predominant AM technology used at JPL due to its ability to create high-quality material with good feature resolution and minimal layer lines. For reference, all parts that have flown on JPL missions to date have been LPBF.

"With that being said, I am interested in other AM technologies, including Directed Energy Deposition (DED) and solid-state processes," Dr. Watkins clarifies. "Concerning wire or blown powder DED, as I've noted previously, I feel strongly that the AM industry needs to be able to scale up to larger geometries. DED seems to have the greatest potential to do so. The biggest challenge moving forward is developing an approach capable of creating fine features."

Regarding solid-state processes, Dr. Watkins mentions [Ultrasound Additive Manufacturing (UAM), which Fabrisonic provides](https://www.voxelmatters.com/fabrisonic-nasa-heat-exchanger-uam/), and Friction Stir AM (FSAM), from MELD. "UAM scales well to larger parts while achieving detailed features and high-quality surface finish due to its hybrid approach. Furthermore, it is a solid-state process, allowing for a wide material selection. We are very interested in using this technology for large thermal management systems that contain integrated fluid loops," Dr. Watkins says. "FSAM – he continues – is also a solid-state AM process. This allows the utilization of a wide range of materials without the thermal history complexities of conventional fusion-based processes. Combined with its ability to refine the material grain structure, it is a great candidate for manufacturing large near-net-shape structures requiring highly qualified material properties.

## To boldly go...

"I firmly believe AM is pivotal in its development cycle. Many manufacturing options now produce high-quality parts that can be qualified for production use. I can also feel the engineering community's perspective on the technology shifting from skepticism to excitement," Watkins states. The question moving forward is whether or not the technology can progress in a way that makes that value proposition starker (for example, currently it is not uncommon for 5-axis machining of a complex part to be cheaper than the same part made with AM) while increasing the size/resolution of the capability. "If we can do that, I expect manufacturing 20 years from now will look very different, especially in aerospace-related industries."