Episode #1
Ursa Major is taking AM hypersonic, one layer at a time
Additive manufacturing has spent the past decade trying to prove itself worthy of a rocket engine. When a small startup out of Colorado decided to build its very first rocket engine almost entirely out of 3D printed parts, a lot of people in the industry assumed it wouldn't hold up. Eleven years later, that company is Ursa Major, and the engine — Hadley — has flown more than ten hypersonic missions. It comes back. It gets inspected. It flies again. That track record is now the foundation for a rapidly expanding portfolio: Draper, a storable version of that same engine that just powered a supersonic flight demonstration for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in January; a solid rocket motor program built around a manufacturing approach the company calls Lynx, designed to print motors of wildly different sizes on the same equipment instead of building a new production line every time the requirement changes; and a fast-growing customer list that now includes Stratolaunch and Sirius Technologies. Along the way, Ursa Major closed a $100 million Series E funding round, broke ground on a new solid rocket motor test site in Colorado, expanded its 3D printing fleet with EOS, and helped found an alliance aimed at rebuilding America's additive manufacturing supply chain for defense. Behind all of that is a surprisingly small team. Our guest today, Tom Pomorski, is Ursa Major's Director of Additive Manufacturing, and he joined the company five years ago to build its in-house additive program essentially from nothing — a handful of machines and a couple of engineers in Youngstown, Ohio. Today that program runs nine metal printers and fourteen people, and Pomorski has watched it grow alongside some of the most demanding flight qualification work happening anywhere in the industry right now. In this conversation, Tom takes us inside how that program actually works — why Ursa Major's entire design process was built around additive manufacturing from day one rather than bolted on afterward, and why he thinks the industry's trust problem with 3D printing has always been more about education than about the parts themselves. We get into the details of Ursa Major's partnership with EOS, including how the company helped unlock custom scan-path software that's now available industry-wide, and what Tom calls physics-based qualification — an approach designed to validate a process once and apply it broadly, rather than requalifying every single part from scratch. We also talk about where artificial intelligence is already showing up on Ursa Major's shop floor, the materials driving their solid rocket motor and liquid engine programs, and Tom's candid take on what it would actually take—in terms of cost, openness, and machine architecture—for metal additive manufacturing to scale the way plastic printing did. It's a rare, detailed look inside how one of the most closely watched propulsion companies in the country actually builds its engines. Here's my conversation with Tom Pomorski, Director of Additive Manufacturing at Ursa Major.
