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 hard, and harder on a tight launch schedule with no room for delays.

Spaceium had three engineers to design, iterate on, and deliver flight-ready hardware before that launch.

So they started using Drafter for their 2D manufacturing drawings, the step that was holding up their hardware development.

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.

The drawing is the document the shop builds from. It has to carry the tolerances, datums, and finishes that decide whether the part that comes back is the part that was designed, and Spaceium was drawing every one of them 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.

Spaceium handed Drafter the most tedious step in hardware documentation. Instead of spending hours or days creating drawings, engineers uploaded parts and got manufacturing-ready drawings back in minutes, fast enough to keep up with their testing cycles.

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. The engineer checks that drawing instead of producing one from nothing, and the check fits inside a test cycle.

With Drafter, Spaceium stayed on track for its launch date, iterating quickly and avoiding costly errors.

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

A drawing that comes back from the shop with questions costs a phone call, a revision, and a place in the queue. A drawing with a wrong tolerance costs a part.

Spaceium also found that editing drawings with Drafter made reviewing and redlining easier, even on the go. A drawing in the browser can be marked up from anywhere, which matters on a schedule with no time to get back to a desk.

With Drafter, Spaceium works like a much larger team without adding headcount or giving up quality: 96% less drawing time, 32 times the throughput, and more than a hundred hours back for three engineers who did not have a hundred hours spare.