{"id":193761,"date":"2024-07-30T10:22:23","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T15:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/engineers-send-3d-printer-into-space"},"modified":"2024-07-30T10:22:23","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T15:22:23","slug":"engineers-send-3d-printer-into-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/engineers-send-3d-printer-into-space","title":{"rendered":"Engineers send 3D Printer into Space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineers-send-3d-printer-into-space3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Imagine a crew of astronauts headed to Mars. About 140 million miles away from Earth, they discover their spacecraft has a cracked O-ring. But instead of relying on a dwindling cache of spare parts, what if they could simply fabricate any part they needed on demand?<\/p>\n<p>A team of Berkeley researchers, led by Ph.D. student Taylor Waddell, may have taken a giant leap toward making this option a reality. On June 8, they sent their 3D printing technology to space for the first time as part of the Virgin Galactic 7 mission.<\/p>\n<p>Their next-generation microgravity printer\u2014dubbed SpaceCAL\u2014spent 140 seconds in suborbital space while aboard the VSS Unity space plane. In that short time span, it autonomously printed and post-processed a total of four test parts, including space shuttles and benchy figurines from a liquid plastic called PEGDA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine a crew of astronauts headed to Mars. About 140 million miles away from Earth, they discover their spacecraft has a cracked O-ring. But instead of relying on a dwindling cache of spare parts, what if they could simply fabricate any part they needed on demand? A team of Berkeley researchers, led by Ph.D. student [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1489,6,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-printing","category-robotics-ai","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}