Ahead of this year's Additive Manufacturing Users Group Conference, keynote speaker Ryan Watkins, Research Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), spoke to TCT about developing 3D printed crushable structures for high-speed impact, balancing innovation with reliability, and the value of integrating AM into everyday engineering challenges to better understand its strengths and limitations.
TCT: To start, can you give us a broad sense of the impact or contribution 3D printing is making within NASA JPL today?
RW: 3D printing has been a part of NASA JPL’s toolkit for over two decades, but its role has grown significantly in recent years. While the first known use of 3D printing on a JPL mission dates back to 1999, it wasn’t until around 2009 that we began making larger investments in the technology. Early research focused on Directed Energy Deposition (DED), particularly its potential for printing gradient alloy systems. By 2015, interest had expanded, with plastic desktop 3D printers becoming prevalent on lab and the establishment of the Additive Manufacturing Center, which officially opened in 2018. Around that time, we also began developing our first metal 3D printed parts for space missions, such as those used on the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021. Since then, 3D printing has continued to make its way into JPL spacecraft, though adoption has been gradual. With that being said, it really feels like we’re at a turning point and I expect the next wave of JPL spacecraft will be extensively build with AM hardware.
I should also note that most of my responses are with respect to metal 3D printing, as that is my primary focus within AM. However, we have extensive plastic 3D printing capabilities, ranging from consumer-grade printers used by engineers to do s mall scale prototyping, to commercial-grade printers in our AdditiveManufacturing Center.
TCT: You recently spoke at the AMUG Conference about ‘linking design with additive manufacturing’ in the context of 3D printed crushable structures for high-speed impact attenuation applications. Why crushable structures and why 3D printing?
RW: Crushable structures are great energy absorbing devices. They are actually all around us — packing foam, in protective gear like helmets, and the crumple zone in the front of your car — we just often don’t think about them that way. Lattice structures are a subset of crushable energy absorbers that exhibit ideal energy absorption characteristics as a result of their structural sparsity and periodicity. They are also widely used in space applications to mitigate shock events during spacecraft deployments, planetary landing events, and launch vehicle separations. 3D printing crushables is particularly interesting because it vastly opens the engineering design space. Using conventional manufacturing methods, crushable lattice design has been limited to foams and honeycombs. With 3D printing, we can now print a wider range of lattice geometry, allowing us to further optimize energy attenuating properties.
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Furthermore, we can now conformally print them into complex form factors, spatially vary their properties, and make them out of a greater range of materials. At JPL, we’re exploring the use of 3D printed titanium lattice structures as energy attenuators for sample return missions. The final stage of these missions often involves a hard landing on Earth, so protecting the samples during impact is a critical challenge. The unique capabilities of 3D printed lattices make them an ideal solution for dissipating landing loads. I’ve been leading this research since 2020, serving as the principal investigator during the early technology development phase and as the primary subject matter expert working to qualify these structures for future flight missions.
TCT: You’ve been at NASA JPL for almost a decade. How has the adoption of AM changed in that time? I wonder, has it followed a similar trajectory to other industries where the technology has transitioned from a novel (dare I say it, ‘sci-fi’) technology to just another tool?
RW: I think JPL has experienced a similar trajectory of adoption to much of the industry. In my early days at JPL, AM was considered an novelty without much practical use. In the cases where people saw its value, it was still heavily scrutinized and often blocked from use due to perceived reliability concerns. Today, its feels like the winds are shifting. JPL has two printers that have been fully qualified per NASA AM qualification standard NASA-STD-6030. We’ve had AM fly on multiple flagship missions. And people are now starting to seek out the use of AM rather than us searching out users. I’m hopeful that the use of AM on our future missions will look much different than it has in the past.
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Mars Sample Return Crush Lattices for AMUG Technical Competition
TCT: Given how prolific NASA JPL’s missions are, having flown to every planet, I love this idea that 3D printing could travel our entire solar system. But to add a dose of reality, what are the limitations to the technology today in terms of NASA JPL’s work? Are there any specific challenges you’ve come up against?
RW: We’re at the beginning of what feels like a growth period for AM, but the technology is still evolving and has limitations. Today, we can build practical, mission-ready hardware with AM, but scalability remains a major hurdle. Many of the parts we want to manufacture simply don’t fit within the mature AM infrastructure, particularly the build volumes of most Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) machines. As a result, even when AM is the ideal solution for a given application, limited machine availability and size constraints often prevent its use. Another significant challenge is the overall process flow. While the actual 3D printing step is relatively fast, post-processing requirements extend lead times considerably. At JPL, printed metal parts often require Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) for fatigue performance, wire cutting to remove them from the build plate, heat treatment for hardened materials, surface finishing to improve fatigue behaviour, and final machining for precision features. Each of these steps adds time and cost. Without advancements that reduce post-processing while maintaining material performance, widespread adoption of AM will continue to be constrained by production efficiency and affordability. Overcoming these barriers will be key to unlocking the full potential of 3D printing for future space missions.
TCT: I think it's easy to forget that a lot of the work being done by NASA isn’t just about space, the learnings are highly applicable to the challenges we face here on earth. With that in mind, what kind of learnings have you found in AM that you believe are applicable to anyone using AM today?
RW: With any new technology, there’s a natural tendency to focus on the big, game-changing applications—the home runs. AM has largely followed this pattern, with much of the early excitement centered around groundbreaking innovations that were never possible before (such as integrated fluid channels, lattice structures, and topology optimization). These ambitious applications are essential for pushing the boundaries of technology, but if we only pursue the most novel and high-risk uses, we limit broader industry adoption. The reality is that many organizations struggle with fully integrating AM because these high-profile projects can seem daunting, both in terms of risk and complexity.
At JPL, we’ve recently shifted our mindset to recognize that adoption requires experience, and experience only comes from actually using the technology — even for more routine applications. The more we integrate AM into everyday engineering challenges, the better we understand its strengths and limitations, making it easier to take on those high-risk, high-reward projects in the future. This lesson applies across industries: rather than waiting for the perfect, groundbreaking use case, companies should start incorporating
AM in practical ways today. Over time, this hands-on experience builds the confidence and expertise needed to fully leverage AM’s potential.
UnitcellHub
TCT: You recently made the decision to open-source your UnitcellHub software. Can you talk about why that was important and how you hope it will be adopted?
RW: Yes, I open-sourced my lattice design suite, UnitcellHub, in October 2024. When I first started working on AM lattices, I quickly realized that engineers had very few tools available to design these structures for specific applications. I initially developed UnitcellHub out of necessity while working on lattice structures for the Mars Sample Return mission. As I continued refining the tool, it became clear that the broader adoption of lattice structures was being held back by the complexity of their design and simulation. Meanwhile, I had built a tool that was solving these challenges — but only I was using it. Open-sourcing UnitcellHub was a way to share this capability and help accelerate lattice adoption in engineering fields beyond JPL.
Another major motivation was the opportunity to give back to the open-source community. Much of the software I develop builds on an extensive ecosystem of open-source tools, and UnitcellHub itself heavily depends on open-source frameworks. It wouldn’t have been possible without the foundation laid by others in the community. By making UnitcellHub freely available, I hope to contribute to that ecosystem, enabling more engineers and researchers to explore the potential of lattice structures for energy absorption, lightweighting, and beyond.
TCT: Can you share with us what you’re working on now, and where you see further opportunities for AM?
RW: Right now, I’m particularly focused on the scalability of additive manufacturing and how the corresponding design ecosystem is evolving. The potential to manufacture large, high-resolution parts with fewer components could completely transform engineering. However, as I highlighted earlier with lattice structures, designing and modeling fine-featured structures on a large scale remains a significant challenge. The complexity of maintaining high precision over macroscopic dimensions is one of the key obstacles we must overcome.
