Advanced manufacturing is changing how spacecraft and aerospace systems are designed, produced and maintained. WAMS 2026, the third ESA/NASA International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing, brought together researchers and engineers from across industry, academia and space agencies to discuss progress in additive manufacturing, advanced joining, process monitoring and manufacturing beyond Earth.
A clear theme throughout the conference was that the field is moving beyond demonstrating what can be manufactured and towards proving that these processes are repeatable, inspectable and suitable for operational use.
What the First Metal Prints on the ISS Revealed
One of the most notable presentations covered the first metal 3D-printing experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station. Stainless-steel samples manufactured using laser wire directed energy deposition were returned to Earth and compared with equivalent terrestrial samples.
The results were perhaps reassuringly unremarkable. Only minor differences in mechanical performance were observed, although changes in pore distribution reflected the influence of microgravity and operational constraints aboard the ISS.
This may not sound like a dramatic outcome, but it is an important one. In engineering, discovering that a process continues to produce broadly comparable material away from Earth is exactly the kind of result that can be hoped for. It shifts the discussion from whether metal additive manufacturing can work in orbit to how it can be controlled, qualified and eventually used routinely.
Closing the Gap to Operational Use
Many presentations focused on process monitoring, non-destructive inspection, powder control, digital manufacturing and certification. This reflected a more mature understanding of advanced manufacturing: producing a part is only one stage of a much wider process chain.
Work on in-line inspection, for example, aims to detect defects during additive manufacture rather than after a component has already been completed. Combining manufacturing data with predictive models and digital twins could ultimately support real-time process correction and more efficient qualification.
Supply-chain resilience and access to specialist materials were also discussed extensively. However, the conference made clear that resilience depends not only on access to feedstock, but also on process knowledge, test infrastructure and qualification capability.
Global Research, Strong UK Contributions
WAMS was a genuinely international event, with contributions from ESA, NASA, universities, research centres and industrial organisations from across Europe and beyond. This diversity was one of the conference’s strengths, bringing together fundamental materials research, industrial manufacturing and future space applications.
The UK was particularly well represented. The Manufacturing Technology Centre presented work on additive manufacturing process development and industrialisation, while TWI contributed across several joining technologies, including friction-stir processing, electron-beam manufacturing and diffusion bonding. British universities also contributed across materials, electronics and space manufacturing.
I attended WAMS 2026 to present the University of Glasgow’s Multi-Purpose Environmental Chamber (MPEC), which supports mechanical testing under representative thermal-vacuum conditions. The wider discussions around process qualification and environmental validation closely reflected the challenges that the facility is intended to address.
WAMS 2026 left me with the impression that the field’s next advances will be measured less by whether a component can be manufactured, and more by whether the process can be controlled, tested and trusted. In the end, capability is not demonstrated by making something once, but by proving that it can be made reliably, time and time again.