Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts

The 1872 cofounders, including Summers, Brian Mongilio, and Michael Grant, all bring relevant experience from having formerly worked for SpaceX. Summers oversaw the engineering team responsible for integrating and fabricating the Raptor engines that power the Super Heavy booster rocket for SpaceX’s Starship launch system. The Raptor team’s use of “intelligent software” for tracking and managing the physical manufacturing of Raptor hardware became the “secret sauce” for implementing changes rapidly and precisely, according to Summers. “We had software engineers that were working with our hardware engineers to not only develop the engine but to develop the system that would build the engine,” Summers told Ars. “Every engine was so different, and we were pushing so much change through the system that without that software, it would have been impossible to know what we needed to build, what we actually built, or how we were going to build it.” That enabled the Raptor team to take the engine from a heavily instrumented, first full-scale concept to a production version within three years, Summers said. By comparison, he pointed out how a typical jet engine development life cycle can exceed two decades. With the new company 1872, the cofounders decided to first focus on automating production of rectangular steel skids because they are “lower precision components” compared to something like an aerospace-grade part for a rocket, Summers said. That leaves more room to be wrong from an automation standpoint while still churning out a useful steel component. “We’re starting with more of the less sexy components on the critical infrastructure side that are really important to our ability to build stuff, and that consume a ton of skilled labor and resources,” Summers said. The 1872 website touts a vision of a heavily automated manufacturing process where customers’ digital design files are fed into an AI-driven software system that creates and schedules a complete manufacturing plan for the steel components, including pricing and sourcing the necessary materials. That “Architect” system would then hand off to a “Conductor” that executes the manufacturing process by orchestrating the movement of material and robotic machines on the factory floor, Summers said. That could include autonomous vehicles for shuttling materials and parts between workstations or robotic arms moving on rails along the length of a production line. “Our differentiator is our ability to take robotic systems that are either built by us or built by partners like Path Robotics, pull them into a single system and orchestrate them together in a way in which you can really achieve a seamless operation,” Summers told Ars. Ideally, each production run will provide additional data that helps train the various AI models involved and allows the overall Architect system to improve in the long run. 1872 is using customized off-the-shelf AI models, including some large language models, and plans to integrate physics-based models that can accurately represent the different manufacturing processes being deployed on the factory floor. The company has already received $15 million in seed funding from private funds advised by The O.H.I.O. Fund, an investment advisory firm. That should ideally be enough to “launch Factory 1, build out the automation software and hardware tech stack, and become profitable,” according to Summers. The company could also eventually expand its automation production process beyond steel skids to structural frames and enclosures. “Over the next 12 months is when we expect to start to really peel back the layers of the onion on the manual processing, and implement automations not only on the physical production floor but digitally as well,” Summers said.