AMAA 2026: Northrop’s Single Piece Tanks Created a New Certification Challenge

• In additive manufacturing for space hardware, the parts easiest to print are often the hardest to certify. A forging and a weld seam unified into one printed piece sounds like pure upside, until someone has to prove it will not fail under pressure in orbit. That was the case Andrew Thompson, Manager of Northrop Grumman’s…

In additive manufacturing for space hardware, the parts easiest to print are often the hardest to certify. A forging and a weld seam unified into one printed piece sounds like pure upside, until someone has to prove it will not fail under pressure in orbit. That was the case Andrew Thompson, Manager of Northrop Grumman’s Additive Manufacturing CoE, made at our AMA: Aerospace, Space & Defense 2025 conference. His company prints hundreds of thousands of tooling parts a year, but the talk was about a harder category, “flyaway products,” meaning hardware that actually flies on the spacecraft. “I want to scale up this technology from brackets that save programs $5,000 and start making tanks that save programs $500,000, if not more, depending on the size,” he said. Our AMA: Aerospace, Space &