SPEE3D's cold-spray metal printers have spent years proving themselves in field depots and shore-based expeditionary units. During this summer's Rim of the Pacific exercise, the company announced its first-ever at-sea deployment, installing a cold-spray system aboard the Canadian support vessel MV Asterix and printing mission-critical parts while underway.
The at-sea trial ran as part of a broader RIMPAC 2026 exercise that stretched from June 24 to July 31, and it wasn't a single vendor showing off hardware in a booth. According to reporting from 3D Printing Industry, the effort brought together the Naval Postgraduate School's Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education (CAMRE), the US Army's DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, the Tennessee Army National Guard, the University of Tennessee Knoxville's Defense Development and Applied Research Center (DARC), the innovation hub FLEETWERX, and both the US Navy and Royal Canadian Navy. That roster reads less like a product demo and more like a coordinated attempt to answer a specific logistics question: can a Navy actually manufacture spare metal parts at sea, on demand, without waiting on a resupply ship or a shore-based depot? RIMPAC 2026 itself was the 30th iteration of the biennial exercise, one of the largest maritime drills in the world, drawing roughly 40 surface ships, five submarines, 140 aircraft, and more than 25,000 personnel into Hawaiian waters and the surrounding Pacific — a scale that makes the at-sea printing trial a small but pointed experiment inside a much larger multinational operation.
What Was Actually Aboard
The hardware itself was SPEE3D's Expeditionary Manufacturing Unit (EMU), built around the company's flagship XSPEE3D system — a cold-spray metal printer that builds parts by accelerating metal powder to supersonic speed and slamming it into a substrate, where the particles deform and bond without melting. That's the core appeal of cold spray for military and expeditionary use: no powder bed, no laser, no shielding gas chamber, and none of the fire and fume hazards that come with fusion-based metal printing — all of which make it dramatically easier to run inside a ship compartment than a laser powder bed fusion machine would be. The EMU was paired with a SPEE3Dcell unit for post-processing, handling the heat treatment and machining steps that turn a cold-sprayed near-net-shape blank into a finished, dimensionally accurate part. CAMRE program manager Lt. Col. Chris Curran, a retired Marine, put the underlying logic simply in comments to 3D Printing Industry: the ability to produce parts while operating at sea "has direct implications for readiness and sustainment" — the two things a deployed force runs short of fastest once a supply chain gets stretched thin.
Over the course of the exercise, the network delivered 32 metal parts total, with 29 of those completed through the full pipeline including heat treatment and machining. Eight of the 32 were printed at sea aboard Asterix itself, with the remaining 24 produced through shore reachback production at the Knoxville Armory — a ship-to-shore production chain rather than a single isolated printer. The parts spanned three material systems: aluminum, stainless steel, and aluminum bronze, covering a meaningfully broad slice of the alloys a Navy maintenance shop would actually need for shipboard hardware, fittings, and mechanical components.
For context on how far the concept has come, 3D Printing Industry notes the prior benchmark was Trident Warrior 24, where a similar cold-spray effort produced 11 parts — but that test was shore-only. RIMPAC 2026 roughly tripled the part count and, more importantly, proved the process could move onto a moving ship without falling apart operationally.
Why a Multinational Crew and a Support Ship Matter
The choice of MV Asterix as the host platform is notable on its own. Asterix is a Canadian-flagged support vessel — not a US Navy hull — and running a US-built additive manufacturing system aboard it, staffed by a mixed US-Canadian team, is as much a statement about interoperability as it is about manufacturing throughput. FLEETWERX Hub Director Morgan Bower is quoted in the 3D Printing Industry piece describing the deployment as producing parts "on NATO vessels using coalition equipment," framing it as evidence that allied navies can share not just doctrine and logistics chains but the actual production capability to keep each other's equipment running.
That framing matters because expeditionary logistics is the whole reason cold-spray printing exists in this context. A carrier strike group or an amphibious task force operating far from a home port has historically depended on a supply chain that can take days or weeks to deliver a single replacement bracket, pump housing, or fitting. SPEE3D has pitched its systems for years as a way to collapse that timeline to hours by manufacturing the part where the ship already is. RIMPAC 2026 is the first time that pitch was tested with an actual multinational at-sea deployment instead of a shore exercise or a controlled demonstration.
What It Means for Makers
None of this hardware is heading to a hobbyist's garage — the XSPEE3D and SPEE3Dcell are industrial systems built for defense logistics budgets, not desktop shelves. But the RIMPAC 2026 deployment is still a useful data point for anyone tracking where metal additive manufacturing is headed as a category. Cold spray keeps proving out as the metal AM process best suited to constrained, hazard-sensitive environments — a ship compartment, a forward operating base, eventually maybe a disaster-response site — precisely because it skips the laser, the powder bed, and the inert-gas handling that make other metal printing processes hard to run outside a dedicated facility. SPEE3D CEO Byron Kennedy framed the RIMPAC results as proof the process now holds up across the range of conditions the military actually operates in, telling 3D Printing Industry that cold spray manufacturing has been "proven in sub-zero, tropical, battle-damage and at-sea conditions."
The parts-per-exercise numbers are also worth watching as a trendline rather than a headline. Going from 11 shore-printed parts at Trident Warrior 24 to 32 parts across a distributed ship-to-shore network, eight of them printed underway, is the kind of steady scaling that suggests the technology is moving from proof-of-concept toward something closer to a standing capability. If that curve continues, the next few RIMPAC cycles could tell us whether cold-spray metal printing becomes a normal fixture of naval logistics — the same way desktop FDM became a normal fixture of prototyping shops a decade ago.
