Recently an opening was posted at LinkedIn and elsewhere for a “senior operations engineer to serve as the extreme owner of the construction, buildout, and operational ramp-up of a new blades and vanes foundry. This role will own delivering complex projects rapidly, at minimum cost, while establishing lean, visually clear, and efficient production flows.”
This position will be obviously attractive to someone with investment casting knowledge and experience, but I’d also say patience, and foresight, or vision. Above all, this is an opening for someone who is uniquely ambitious. Metalcasting careers are demanding in their own ways, but this is a role for someone who - while loving the industry - wants to rise above the status quo. The little we know about it starts with the fact that the position will be with a greenfield operation under development by SpaceX.
The new investment casting foundry at Bastrop, in east-central Texas, will cast equiaxed, directionally solidified, and single-crystal components. Texas economic development records portray the foundry as a $280-million project to cover more than 1 million square feet of space.
It is to be part of the vertical integration strategy for the SpaceX complex already underway there.
Nothing is confirmed about the foundry’s output, but one report maintains the blades and vanes to be cast there will be nickel-superalloy hot-section components for industrial gas turbines - parts that are in critical short supply for powering hundreds or even thousands of new data centers.
Alternately, or possibly in addition, it’s reasonable to foresee those investment cast blades and vanes as part of turbopumps to power liquid rocket engines.
Along with the posting quoted here, the new foundry is recruiting dedicated senior operations, automation, material, and tooling engineers. The project is still in development, but the Bastrop complex already is home to SpaceX’s Starlink aerospace manufacturing activities, including mass-production of orbital AI satellites; a 10-GW solar cell/wafer production center; and panel-level semiconductor packaging.
As impressive, and exciting, as all this will be for ambitious metalcasting techs, it takes only a bit of vision by the rest of us to see that SpaceX is the brainchild (or one of them) of Elon Musk, and to recall his seminal role in another “threshold crossing” for metalcasting.
Among Musk’s less controversial accomplishments has been spearheading domestic development and commercial growth of electric vehicles. He guided Tesla toward vertical integration too, and he pushed for the manufacturing technologies to optimize and accelerate production.
Prior to Tesla's adaptation of high-pressure diecasting to produce automotive unibodies, HPDC was confined to smaller or mid-sized automotive components, like transmission housings, engine blocks, brackets, and shock towers. HPDC machines producing such parts typically have clamping forces maxing out around 4,000 tons.
The oversized HPDC machines that Tesla commissioned to cast automotive unibodies have clamping forces of 5,500 tons, or more. Rebranding this process as megacasting or gigacasting played right into the outsized ambition that Musk and his collaborators thrive upon.
Tesla’s audacity in product and production design lent cache to metalcasting in an industrial sector (automotive) where the risk of commodification is great. And the ambition has been inspirational to competitors (including Ford Motor, General Motors, Honda, Mercedes, Volvo, and several Tier suppliers) that have embraced megacasting so far.
The metalcasting industry badly needs the example of Musk/Tesla now. Metalcasters need a vision of new frontiers for investment casting and other process, in the way that gigacasting reset the frontiers for HPDC.
They’ll need patience too. Patience is a virtue that ensures ambition is not thwarted and vision is not obscured by missteps or failures. It’s easier to be patient when your project is backed by a man with a net worth estimated at over $870 billion, but patience is no less important if the vision is to endure and the ambition is to be rewarded.
Of course, they will need money. In fact, they’ll need to broaden their expectations of what it is they’re investing to accomplish. Much of the capital financing metalcasting enterprises today is private equity - which is perfectly legitimate. But PE investments are mainly predicated on return-on-investment, not technological advancement or process and product development. Ambition will require some reconciliation of those goals.
The metalcasting industry has many great minds and dedicated men and women guiding, nurturing, and strengthening it with real devotion. They love its legacies, and they strive to uphold those.
But the launch of a new investment casting foundry under the SpaceX banner is a fresh reminder that metalcasting - in fact, every manufacturing sector - needs pioneers too.
