NASA’s Plans for Development of a Standard for Additive Manufactured Components

The current version of NASA standards for manned spaceflight hardware do not contain sufficient detail for the certification of additively manufactured components. The development of additive manufactured standards is currently in work by several standards organizations. However, NASA cannot wait on these organizations to develop such standards. NASA and its program partners in manned spaceflight (Commercial Crew, Space Launch System and the Orion Multi-purpose Crew Vehicle) are actively developing additively manufactured components for flight as early as 2018. NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) has taken the lead and has authored a center level standard to aid in the development of standard practices for Powder Based Fusion processes. The goal of this standard is to provide a consistent framework for the development, production and evaluation of additively manufactured components for spaceflight applications. A draft of this document was released in July 2015 and a wide-reaching peer review was conducted. Release of this specification is expected in early 2017. This standard contains requirements that address part classification, metallurgical process control, material property development, part process control, part inspection and acceptance, equipment process control and vendor process control. In addition to manned spaceflight, consideration also has to be given to developing standard practices for other NASA missions such as science missions and aeronautics. To do so, consideration would have to be given to additively manufactured technologies besides Powder Bed Fusion. This paper will present an outline on how this standard and its principles are being used to tailor requirements for manned spaceflight applications. Also discussed are the initial plans for a NASA wide standard which could be tailored for all NASA applications and appropriate additively manufactured technologies.