MakerBot Explorers | Lockheed Martin

You won’t believe what the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center created for NASA with their MakerBot® Desktop 3D Printers.

The James Webb Telescope will be NASA’s biggest science mission to date, the largest telescope ever launched, and the first to carry a camera optimized for viewing infrared light, the NIRCam. Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) is tasked with building it. That doesn’t intimidate ATC engineer Alison Nordt, who believes that the James Webb Telescope’s pictures of deep space “will change our understanding of the universe and be much more spectacular than anything we’ve ever seen before.”

To move things along as the telescope approaches its ambitious 2018 launch date, the team at ATC purchased a few MakerBot Desktop 3D Printers. John Camp, a former Lockheed Martin mechanical engineer, created the 3D printing lab that helped ATC deliver the NIRCam to the Johnson Space Center on time and continues to serve ATC’s many projects for NASA.