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

“We’re not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy.”

Three former SpaceX engineers have switched their attention from making rocket engines to manufacturing steel parts by using AI-driven software and robots. Their immediate goal involves establishing a prototype factory that can automate most of the steel fabrication process for crucial infrastructure components by 2027.

The startup, called 1872, officially launched on July 22 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its Factory One facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company is initially focused on automating the manufacturing of steel skids—rectangular steel frames that can provide a moveable foundation for modular buildings—with the goal of supplying customers who are developing AI data centers or small modular nuclear reactors.

“We’re building towards autonomy, but we’re not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy,” Dan Summers, CEO of 1872, told Ars. “We may achieve 80 percent autonomous operations, and we may decide that it makes sense to stop there because there’s just diminishing returns to go to full 100 percent.”

The push for automation is not just about saving money. Industry associations have long warned of a growing shortage of skilled labor capable of supporting US efforts to build new AI data centers, semiconductor fabs, automotive factories, and shipyards.

The American Welding Society estimates that the United States will need 320,500 new welding professionals by 2029 because of retirements from an aging workforce, along with soaring demand for welding work. The Trump administration’s tightening restrictions on legal immigration and crackdown on undocumented immigration are further limiting options for welding-intensive industries such as shipbuilding.

“The problem that we are trying to solve is how do we build more things with a decreasing pool of skilled labor to do it with, and this is a good place to start in terms of implementing automation,” Summers said.

From rocket engines to steel skids

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.

Robotic versus human welding

To get started, 1872 first relied on human workers to establish a manual process for producing finished skids, Summers said. But the company has also been working to integrate technologies such as robotic arms capable of doing automated welding for combining metal pieces, in partnership with the Columbus-based company Path Robotics.

The standard process of arc welding creates an electric arc between an electrode stick or wire and metal material. That electric arc generates enough heat to melt metal at a joint between two metal parts, which allows the two parts to be combined once the molten metal has solidified again.

For arc welding, Path Robotics claims its robots typically achieve between 95 and 100 percent on first-pass yields, meaning the share of parts that pass quality inspection the first time without requiring reworking or resulting in scrap.

The robotic arms also work more efficiently by spending 70 percent of their working time with the arc on. By comparison, human workers have an arc-on time of just 10 to 12 percent because they spend more time aligning and repositioning metal pieces or adjusting the tool.

Such robotic efficiency can reduce welding costs by 85 percent, according to Path Robotics. That comes from a Path Robotics workstation being able to perform welding for about $0.12 per weld inch, whereas manual welding by hand costs about $0.78 per weld inch.

Welding a skid can take two to four hours, but assembling all the cut components for the welding process can take four to five days, Summers explained. So the company is especially keen on figuring out how automation can reduce the time required for assembling the skid components. “The whole name of the game is how do we keep that machine fed,” he said.

The AI-driven architect

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.