Made In Space

Made In Space put the first 3D printer aboard the International Space Station. In November 2014 it manufactured the first object ever made off Earth. Its Additive Manufacturing Facility followed in 2016 and became a permanent fixture, printing tools and parts to order for NASA and commercial customers, which for years made it the rare space manufacturing company with a working product rather than a plan.

The founding idea, from 2010, was that deep space missions cannot carry every spare part, so the ability to make things in orbit stops being a luxury and becomes a precondition. From the printer the ambition scaled up: Archinaut, funded by NASA at $73.7 million in 2019, was to assemble large structures in open space.

The company did not stay independent long enough to build them. Redwire, then a newly formed roll-up of space suppliers, acquired Made In Space in June 2020 as one of its founding pieces, and the name has since been folded into Redwire's own. The ISS printer still runs, the team's work continues under another flag, and the brand that made the first thing in space no longer makes anything under it.