Case Study: NASA achieves rapid, flight‑qualified production of high‑performance thrusters with Carbon DLS

The Technology House produces NASA-certified, high-performance parts with the Carbon DLS™ process

NASA needed to design and certify four compact, high-performance cold-gas thrusters for the Seeker free-flyer on an aggressive ~1-year timeline and inside a highly constrained 10 cm x 10 cm vehicle face. Traditional machining could not produce the complex internal passages and tight tolerances required, so NASA worked with The Technology House using Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis (Carbon DLS) process and Cyanate Ester 221 (Carbon CE 221) material to pursue an agile, additive-manufacturing approach.

Using Carbon’s DLS technology, TTH iterated the thruster manifolds through more than 10 design cycles, tuned post-processing to control variation (hitting critical 0.026‑inch throat tolerances), and validated the CE 221 material by pressurizing 100+ articles to failure. The result: parts that met NASA safety and flight requirements, four flight‑ready thrusters, a shortened certification timeline, an on‑demand repeatable production process, and a program delivered in just over a year for under $3 million—demonstrating Carbon’s DLS as a viable, high‑performance production solution for space hardware.

NASA