First amateur 3D-printed rocket engine

On Saturday, 5 October 2013, students from the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California in San Diego, USA, successfully hot-tested a 3D-printed rocket engine at a 10-acre site run by the Friends of Amateur Rocketry Inc. (FAR) testing site in the Mojave Desert. Students from the University's chapter of Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), designed and built the rocket between February 2013 and October 2013 – in cooperation with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre – to explore the feasibility of manufacturing expensive rocket motors from more cost-effective 3D printing techniques. In doing so, they became the first amateur group to make and successfully test a printed rocket motor. Tri-D, as the engine was called, was 17.7 cm (7 in) long and weighed 4.5 kg (10 lb). It was fabricated using a chromium-cobalt alloy powder using a 3D-metal-printing process called “sintering”. The propellants used were kerosene and liquid oxygen. The engine produced about 200 pounds of thrust (890 newtons or 91 kg). At this point, NASA had only concentrated on testing engine parts, representative of what they would need in a fully engineered rocket. None of the records in NASA's archives indicate that they ever tested a self-contained rocket as the students here had built.