Lifeboat Foundation

The ultimate way of building up space structures would be to use material sourced there, rather than launched from Earth. Once processed into finished composite material, the resin holds the carbon fibres together as a solid rather than a fabric. The beams can be used to construct more complex structures, antennae, or space station trusses. Image credit: All About Space/Adrian Mann.

The International Space Station is the largest structure in space so far. It has been painstakingly assembled from 32 launches over 19 years, and still only supports six crew in a little-under-a-thousand cubic metres of pressurised space. It’s a long way from the giant rotating space stations some expected by 2001. The problem is that the rigid aluminium modules all have to be launched individually, and assembled in space. Bigelow Aerospace will significantly improve on this with their inflatable modules that can be launched as a compressed bundle; but a British company has developed a system that could transform space flight, by building structures directly in space.

Magna Parva from Leicester are a space engineering consultancy, founded in 2005 by Andy Bowyer and Miles Ashcroft. Their team have worked on a range of space hardware, from methods to keep Martian solar panels clear of dust, to ultrasonic propellant sensors, to spacecraft windows. But their latest project is capable of 3D printing complete structures in space, using a process called pultrusion. Raw carbon fibres and epoxy resin are combined in a robotic tool to create carbon composite beams of unlimited length – like a spider creating a web much larger than itself. Building structures in space has a range of compounding virtues, it is more compact than even inflatables, as only bulk fibre and resin need to be launched. Any assembled hardware that has to go through a rocket launch has to be made much stronger than needed in space to survive the launch, printed structures can be designed solely for their in space application, using less material still.

Designer Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled the “Feel the Peel”, a combo orange juicer/3D printer that makes bioplastic cups out of leftover orange peels.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The entire Apollo 11 mission to the moon took just eight days. If we ever want to build permanent bases on the moon, or perhaps even Mars or beyond, then future astronauts will have to spend many more days, months and maybe even years in space without a constant lifeline to Earth. The question is how would they get hold of everything they needed. Using rockets to send all the equipment and supplies for building and maintaining long-term settlements on the moon would be hugely expensive.

This is where 3D printing could come in, allowing astronauts to construct whatever their lunar colony needed from raw materials. Much of the excitement around 3D printing in space has focused on using it to construct buildings from lunar rock. But my research suggests it may actually be more practical to use this moondust to supply lunar manufacturing labs turning out replacement components for all sorts of equipment.

Anders Ohlsson Delivery Manager at Sandvik Additive Manufacturing, shared his excitement for the new process in the Sandvik press release stating, “On seeing its potential, we began to wonder what else would be possible from 3D-printing complex shapes in a material that is three times stiffer than steel, with heat conductivity higher than copper, the thermal expansion close to Invar – and with a density close to aluminum.”

Today we are taking a look at how Sandvik created the first-ever 3D printed diamond composite.

The current menu of space-friendly foods uses processing and water-reduction strategies to make these meals shelf stable. For example, a shrimp cocktail, mashed potatoes, and strawberries can be freeze dried; beef stew, candied yams, and brown rice can be thermostabilized; beef steak and turkey can be irradiated; and brownies, bread products, and beverage powders can be brought up in a low-moisture or dried form.

As tasty as this feast sounds, this packaged food system does not meet the five-year shelf life required for a Mars mission, nor will it feed generations there in the years to come. How will space food therefore have to change if we are ever to colonize other planets?

Using existing space technologies, it will take up to 32 months to travel to Mars. How can you feed a crew for that three-year trip?

Sacrificial ink-writing technique allows 3D printing of large, vascularized human organ building blocks.

AMAZING STUFF, 3D printing is revolutionizing medical and technological science… Respect AEWR wherein we have found the causes and a cure for the pandemic plague mankind has called natural aging when it is the reverse the most unnatural thing on earth to do is age and die. Proven long ago by Science sitting waiting for us to pick it up in the established data of mankind’s humanities… We search for partners-investors to now join us in agiongs end… r.p.berry

The Chicago-based biotech company BIOLIFE4D announced today that it has successfully 3D-bioprinted a mini human heart. The tiny heart has the same structure as a full-sized heart, and the company says it’s an important milestone in the push to create an artificial heart viable for transplant.