The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will hold an Industry Day on March 18 to provide potential vendors with information on a program that aims to establish design and production approaches that can accommodate widely variable materials to address current manufacturing limitations in supply chain-denied environments.
Under the Rubble to Rockets (R2) program, selected offerers will build a flexible, inexpensive platform to support the production of raw materials and use that platform to modify the structural design of a sounding rocket.
“Existing manufacturing approaches require stability. Building a framework that can enable the manufacture of structures out of anything, anywhere, and at many sizes would break the status quo for manufacturing in resource-contested environments,” said Hunter Martin, program manager for the R2 program at DARPA.
“We’re focusing on sounding rockets for proof of concept because they represent a single-use structure with multiple components and complex structural requirements, but anticipate broad applicability to a wide range of manufacturing use cases – from spare parts and infrastructure repair to system production,” added Martin.
The R2 program will also advance the use of material informatics and novel manufacturing and processing techniques.
Interested stakeholders should register no later than Wednesday, March 13.