NEW ORLEANS – Additive manufacturing startup Rosotics announced plans Jan. 14 to halt sales of its metal 3D printer Halo to focus on building a fleet of orbital transfer vehicles.
“We intend to produce heavyweight infrastructure to stay in orbit long term: a propellant depot, a power plant, a shipyard,” Rosotics CEO Christian LaRosa told SpaceNews. “The way to do that is beginning to be unlocked from platforms like Starship and the platform that we will operate.”
Halo, Rosotics’ machine for printing large structures, combined with the company’s expertise in cold welding, which joins metals without heat, are key to establishing the infrastructure, LaRosa said. Cold welding “is the only way to assemble and manufacture vast quantities of material in the vacuum of space,” he added.
Rosotics plans to work with multiple launch providers to send a fleet of vehicles to Earth-moon Lagrange point 5, a location cited in Gerard K. O’Neill’s 1976 book, “The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.”
L5 is as an ideal refueling location for missions heading to Mars or the asteroid belt, LaRosa said. Plus, the NASA Artemis program is spurring activity around the moon.
“We will benefit from missions going to and coming from lunar orbit,” LaRosa said. “Artemis will also benefit from what we will do in this program.”
Florida Bound
Rosotics is moving its headquarters from Mesa, Arizona, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the company will be hiring people for spacecraft construction and operations. In conjunction with the move, Austin Thurman, Rosotics co-founder and chief operating officer, is leaving the firm.
Meanwhile, Rosotics will no longer provide additive manufacturing services to the naval and maritime markets.
“We will equip our partners and those adjacent to us with our research and development platforms,” LaRosa said. “We’ll help them implement those systems under their own name to service those markets.”
Although Rosotics will take no additional orders for Halo, “we will be honoring every order that has been placed to date,” LaRosa said.
With future Halo machines, Rosotics intends to mass-produce orbital transfer vehicles.
Mass to Orbit
New launch vehicles taking flight, including Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn, prompted Rosotics’ latest move. In addition to increasing the amount of mass sent to Earth orbit, the new vehicles can offer transportation to new destinations.
Reaching L5 requires a series of complex maneuvers with a vehicle that “is heavily mass-optimized,” LaRosa said. “We intend to privatize Halo to build a fleet of greater than a dozen spacecraft additively manufactured in the form of an unpressurized hull.”
Funding Needed
Rosotics’ ambitious plans will require significant funding.
Since the startup was established in 2019, it has spent $2.6 million, according to the news release. The firms 2022 pre-seed round, led by Draper Associates, raised $750,000.
