In the last year, Fortastra has emerged as a provider of manoeuvrable spacecraft designed for on-orbit defence and security for critical space infrastructure.
The motivating factor behind the company's existence is its observation that space is becoming a 'contested environment.'
Its leadership has prior experience at the likes of SpaceX, Relativity Space, Divergent, and Hermeus, giving it plenty of insight into the development of the space sector, and more than a little into technologies like additive manufacturing.
So, as the company sets about designing satellites that are capable of autonomously inspecting and responding to space threats, it was no surprise to see it align with Hadrian - a company that launched a dedicated additive manufacturing business earlier this year - to assess how advanced manufacturing methodologies, including 3D printing, could be applied within spacecraft development programs.
Earlier this month, the two companies announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). As the news dropped, Fortastra's Vice President of Product, Sahil Desai [SD], and Hadrian's VP of Additive Manufacturing, Matthew Parker [MP], spoke to TCT to tell us what we can expect from their collaboration.
TCT: Sahil, Matthew, thanks for taking the time. Fortastra and Hadrian recently announced a Memorandum of Understanding. At a high level, how would you define the objective of this partnership?
MP: Hadrian announced our additive manufacturing group back in January. So, it’s a relatively young group within Hadrian, and it’s being built around what our customers need. An MOU like this, with a customer like Fortastra, allows us to design the system around what they need. Incidentally, what they need is similar to what other organisations in the industry need, and so we’re building a capability that meets an intermediate need and allows Fortastra to scale quickly. It also gives Hadrian that early customer view of what our customers need in order to be successful.
SD: One of the primary activities as part of this MOU is that we have Matthew’s small but growing team engaging directly with our small but growing engineering team. And that interface, it’s not bottlenecked at Matthew and I; we’re really having the engineering teams come together, collaborate, learn about, once again, their projects, their initiatives, their capabilities, and how we can incorporate that into the design cycle. And, obviously, them about our needs, how we’re approaching it, what types of requirements our spacecraft and our systems will encounter.
TCT: So, what do you see as the big advantage of bringing the engineering teams together and having them work so closely together?
