Elon Musk Creates Rocket Parts With the Wave of a Hand

By Nancy Atkinson - September 5, 2013 at 9:27 PM UTC | Space Exploration
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We knew SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was powerful, but now he's gone all

Ironman

on us. Last week on

Twitter

he posted a teaser, saying, "Will post video of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & immediately printing in titanium."

And now, here it is.

"I believe we're on the verge of a major breakthrough in design and manufacturing," says Musk in the video, "in being able to take a concept of something from your mind and translate into a 3-D object intuitively on the computer, then make that virtual 3-D object real just by printing it. It's going to revolutionize manufacturing and design in the 21st century."

See a montage of images of a SuperDraco rocket part made of Inconel-X, an austenitic nickel-chromium-based superalloy, emerge from a 3-D printer:

Musk and his design team have been working on using natural gesture-based interaction with a computer-aided design program called

Leap Motion

, allowing designers to work quickly to create parts, and then equally as quick, use 3-D printing in a metal superalloy to create the part.

Very cool.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com