Additive manufacturing for CubeSat structure fabrication

Additive manufacturing (AM) refers to advanced technologies able to fabricate, adding material layer by layer, high complex near-net-shaped functional components directly from a virtual model. They offer several advantages including no geometrical limitations, flexibility, reduction or elimination of tooling and fixturing, shorter cycle time. Classic CubeSat design can be outperformed by AM allowing new opportunities such as lightweight structures with reduced number of components. Especially for the development of constellations, the production of a high number of satellites moves to new manufacturing approaches suitable for series productions but maintaining a high level of flexibility. Through the employment of the Design for AM methodologies the switching between traditional manufacturing systems and these new technologies has the potential to be beneficial in terms of: functionality, buy-to-fly ratio, flexibility, logistics, assembly stage.