UMaine Launches 3Dirigo X, a 30-Foot 3D-Printed Boat Built for Open Water

From lab curiosity to working hull

Seven years after the University of Maine turned heads with the original 3Dirigo, the school has put a sequel in the water. 3Dirigo X is a 30-foot, high-performance boat printed at UMaine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center in Hampden, Maine, and it is meant to do something the first vessel never tried: operate in real offshore conditions at speeds approaching 40 knots.

The launch on Friday drew university officials, U.S. Senator Susan Collins, and Keith DeVries, the Manufacturing Technology director at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. That guest list is a hint about where this project is headed. 3Dirigo X is not a tech demo for tech demo's sake. It is a prototype for a manufacturing method that could let shipbuilders skip expensive molds, change designs digitally, and produce hulls or components faster than traditional boatbuilding allows.

Why the leap matters

The original 3Dirigo, unveiled in 2019, proved a boat this size could be printed at all. It earned three Guinness World Records and made for great photos. 3Dirigo X tries to answer the next question: can you actually use the thing?

UMaine says the new hull is engineered for higher speeds and the forces of open-ocean operation. The printing rate has jumped too, from about 20 pounds per hour when the research started to roughly 500 pounds per hour today. The university's upcoming Factory of the Future, part of a new 55,000-square-foot GEM facility, is supposed to push that to 1,000 pounds per hour.

Those numbers matter because large-scale additive manufacturing only becomes competitive if it is faster than carving tooling and laying up fiberglass by hand. Habib Dagher, the center's executive director, put it plainly: "We can model and design vessels that can withstand the kinds of extreme environments in the open ocean."

Defense and digital twins

The project is funded through the Accelerated Rapid Prototyping initiative, a federal program that links UMaine with defense research labs and industry partners. The military angle is straightforward. Unmanned vessels, patrol craft, logistics boats, and sensor platforms all need hulls that can be adapted for different missions without retooling a whole shipyard.

DeVries framed it as a digital-manufacturing play. Each printed hull becomes a data point that feeds the next design. "This is not a finish line," he said at the launch. "This boat just started a new journey, being run through its paces to evaluate its suitability in the waters of the Atlantic."

That is the honest read. A single successful launch does not mean navies will start printing destroyers next year. But it does move the conversation from "look what we printed" to "let's see if it holds up."

Workforce and Maine's economy

UMaine has also made the project a training ground. The Advanced Structures and Composites Center has employed more than 3,000 student interns over the years, and 3Dirigo X gives current students hands-on work in digital design, materials science, and advanced manufacturing.

For Maine, which has a long boatbuilding heritage and a need for new advanced-manufacturing jobs, the project doubles as an economic signal. Chancellor Dannel Malloy's comment that "every aircraft carrier is going to have their own printer" might be optimistic, but the underlying point is sound: distributed manufacturing near the point of need is a lot more attractive than it used to be.

The real test now is whether 3Dirigo X survives repeated sea trials. If it does, UMaine will have shown that large-format 3D printing can move from novelty to a practical tool for making things that take a beating.