“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Stew Magnuson
“A startup that has devised a way to sharply reduce the amount of time it takes to build a small drone can also call on a global network of 3D printers to surge capacity within export licensing requirements.”
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“San Diego-based startup Firestorm Labs can 3D print the airframe of a Group 2 unmanned aerial vehicle — about 21 to 55 pounds — in around nine hours and finish integrating all its components in a total of 36 hours, Brett Barbee, vice president of business development at the company, said in an interview.
The company brought its Tempest 50 drone to the Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX 24-2, demonstration in Indiana, held during a two-week period in the summer to assess innovative warfighting capabilities. The demo was part of the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve initiative, organized by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
Barbee attributed the speed in which it can build a new airframe to three factors: the 3D printing process, the simplicity of design and the use of commercial-off-the-shelf components.
The company “can quickly scale from zero to many, depending on warfighter demand and need,” he said. It builds the aircraft in its San Diego headquarters, which is set to expand. But if there is a large order it can’t handle, Firestorm can lean on a network of 3D printing contractors in other parts of the world to take up the slack.
“We have very strong relationships across the additive manufacturing space that enable us to tap into those printers globally,” he said. The company’s technology meets export license requirements, he noted.
Once the airframe is complete, the company rapidly integrates the payloads specified by the customer.
“We can quickly modify the design of the airframe to accommodate a lot of different sensors and payloads,” he said. That includes electronic warfare devices, data links and, if required, explosive material.
“There are a lot of options out there available to the warfighter to meet a plethora of mission use cases. We’re able to … integrate those things rapidly, based on the freedom and flexibility that we have in our airframe,” he added. He estimated that it would take six to eight weeks to assemble a similar-sized drone using traditional manufacturing processes.
A finished product would be one-fifth the cost of other Group 2 fixed-wing drones. “When you couple one-fifth the cost at about a 10th of the time to manufacture, those are two pretty compelling differentiators,” he added.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stew Magnuson is the Editor in Chief of National Defense Magazine.
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