From LEGO® Sets to NASA Standards and Beyond
From an early age growing up in south Chicago, Rick Russell was hooked on the space program. He was glued to the TV, watching the Apollo missions, building LEGO® rockets, and witnessing a man walking on the moon. Rick went to the University of Illinois on a scholarship from a steel mill and earned a BS in Metallurgical Engineering. But when all the steel jobs dried up due to the economy, he decided to continue his education, getting his MS degree at the University of Florida. This venue change also led to a new career path, and after a brief stint with the Navy doing failure analysis, Rick landed his dream job at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
His NASA career started with working on the Space Shuttle program, where he was involved in processing the vehicles in between flights, which involved all sorts of amazing opportunities to help solve complex problems. Rick’s most significant assignment came in 2003 after the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, where he was asked to lead the Materials Group supporting the reconstruction and failure analysis. When the program ended in 2011, Rick was the lead Materials and Processes engineer within the Orbiter project office.
After the Shuttle program ended, Rick was asked to help start-up NASA’s new Commercial Crew Program (CCP), where he led both the Materials and Processes and Fracture Control disciplines. This was when he was first introduced to additive manufacturing (AM), after SpaceX introduced part designs for both the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Leaning on work done by the Marshall Space Flight Center for the RS-25 engine redesign, Rick and the CCP developed a strategy to qualify and certify these SpaceX parts for manned spaceflight.
A few years later, Rick was promoted to the Agency-wide position of Technical Fellow for Materials. With the growing use of AM, he recognized the need for an Agency AM standard and subsequently organized and led the team that wrote NASA-STD-6030, “Additive Manufacturing Requirements for Spaceflight Systems”. At the first meeting for this effort, Rick laid out a goal of creating a standard that would be used for any material, any process, and any program. The end product, when properly tailored, came really close to this goal. This standard, though written for NASA use, quickly became widely used throughout the AM industry.
Rick retired from NASA in late 2022, and after a brief stint in industry, he joined TBGA in April 2024. At TBGA, he continues to bring his passion for creating and problem-solving to life, helping shape advanced technologies and laying the foundation for the next generation of innovators. Just like the intricate LEGO® models he constructed as a boy, Rick thrives on taking individual pieces—whether they’re materials, processes, or people—and assembling them into something extraordinary.
“I am thrilled to be working with TBGA’s world-class team to help advance the adoption of AM.” Among his current projects, Rick is supporting the Navy’s development of AM parts for the Maritime Industrial Base and the Air Force’s QUalification of Additive Structures for Aerospace Requirements (QUASAR) to evaluate the industry state of the art for metal AM of fracture critical components.