Boeing is one of the large specialized companies in the aerospace world that, for quite some time, has seen how 3D printing can make a large part of its manufacturing processes and designs become a lot faster and above all economical. Due to this, it is not surprising that they want to take this technology to all the markets in which they compete and, among them, there is space.
In this field, it should be noted, as Boeing itself has officially communicated, that thanks to its latest research, new processes capable of change the current landscape in terms of satellite manufacturing. Apparently, thanks to these methodologies where the use of 3D printed modular parts would be involved, the number of units that would be able to manufacture per year can be significantly increased, which, as a detail, is currently less than 10.
Boeing wants to increase its pace of manufacturing satellites to produce one every 15 days.
Basically what Boeing wants is not to compete with other satellite manufacturing companies such as OneWeb or Airbus, which today manufacture small satellites at a rate of hundreds of units a year, but rather it intends to stay in a market sector where customers demand much larger units, hence the desire to increase the number of satellites produced, which in turn would bring them much higher profits.
If we put all this in perspective, tell you that what they want in the company is literally to get reach the same level of speed as the aircraft division where it literally costs them to build a Boeing 737 in just 11 days. The negative part of all this is that, when manufacturing modular satellites, their lifetime is shortened by half, staying at 7 or 8 years, as a positive part of this, the price is also reduced to only a third.