How a three-person team is building space hardware faster.

Spaceium is building orbital servicing spacecraft to refuel and repair satellites in space. Designing, testing, and certifying space hardware in a matter of months is a monumental challenge, especially with a tight launch schedule and no room for delays.

With just three engineers, Spaceium faced the task of moving fast enough to design, iterate, and deliver flight-ready hardware under intense time pressure.

To succeed, they partnered with Drafter to streamline their hardware development and eliminate bottlenecks in creating 2D manufacturing drawings.

Every part heading to space needs a precise 2D drawing for manufacturing. But manually creating those drawings was slowing them down, threatening to derail their schedule.

A drawing is not paperwork. It is the document the shop actually builds from, and it has to carry the tolerances, datums, and finishes that decide whether the part that comes back is the part that was designed. Every one of them had to be drawn by hand. On a team of three, an hour spent drawing is an hour not spent designing or testing, and there were only so many of those before the launch date.

By integrating Drafter into their workflow, Spaceium offloaded the most tedious step in hardware documentation. Instead of spending hours or days creating drawings, engineers could upload parts and receive manufacturing-ready drawings in minutes, keeping pace with their rapid testing cycles.

What changed is where the work happens. A part goes in as a model and a drawing comes back with the views laid out, the features toleranced against a consistent datum scheme, and the notes in place. Checking a drawing that already exists is a different job from producing one from nothing, and it is a job that fits inside a test cycle rather than blocking it.

Drafter helped Spaceium maintain velocity, iterate quickly, and avoid costly errors, all while staying on track for their ambitious launch deadline.

Drawings were accepted with minimal feedback, even under tight tolerances and fast-turn manufacturing.

That is the part that is easy to underrate. A drawing that comes back from the shop with questions costs a phone call, a revision, and a place in the queue, and a drawing that is wrong in a tolerance costs a part. Consistency is what makes fast-turn manufacturing safe to rely on.

One unexpected benefit? Editing drawings with Drafter made reviewing and redlining seamless, even on the go. A drawing that lives in the browser can be marked up from anywhere, which counts for something on a schedule that does not pause for anyone to get back to a desk.

Thanks to Drafter, Spaceium now operates with the agility of a much larger team, without expanding headcount or sacrificing quality. Those are the numbers on the strip above: 96% less time in the drawing, 32 times the throughput, and more than a hundred hours returned to three engineers who did not have a hundred hours spare.