NASA Looks to 3-D Printing for Spare Parts for Space Station: Scientific American
Launch $1-billion-worth of spare parts to the International Space Station, and you can keep Earth’s orbital outpost going for another decade. Send up some 3D-printing devices, and you invest in the ability to build everything on demand in space: space-station parts, astronaut tools, satellites, even spacecraft.
A first step toward space factories may come from NASA’s recent selection of a U.S. startup’s proposal to build a 3D printer for the space station. Such printing technology could build any number of objects, layer by layer, based on designs uploaded from mission control. Astronauts would only need “feedstock” material, such as plastic or metal, to make new tools or spare parts on the fly.
“When a tool breaks, at the very worst the space-station crew calls Houston and says, ‘Send us a CAD (computer-aided design) file of that tool,’ and they’ll be able to 3D-print it,” said Jason Dunn, chief technology officer and cofounder of Made in Space, Inc. “Ideally, one day they’ll be able to design it themselves.”
Made in Space came out of Singularity University — a school for startups aimed at solving the world’s biggest problems. It chose to locate itself at the NASA Ames Research Park in Moffett Field, Calif., near Silicon Valley.
The founders estimate that printing parts in space could reduce the structural mass of objects by at least 30 percent, because the objects would not need to survive Earth’s gravity or the extreme G-forces of launching into orbit aboard a rocket.
“Our long-term goal for 3D printing is to actually build functioning spacecraft,” Dunn told InnovationNewsDaily. “A Cubesat (miniature satellite) could be built with the machine we are designing for the space station in the next several years.”
First, the company must create a 3D printer that works well in the seemingly weightless conditions of space. It used past NASA funding to test a prototype and several commercial 3D printers during two hours worth of stomach-churning aircraft dives meant to simulate microgravity. Such printing runs led to the world’s first tool — a small wrench — ever printed in partial gravity.