Outsourcing into Orbit

New company Made in Space is thinking outside the box--and outside our hemisphere. They advocate moving space station parts production from factories to launching 3-D printers into orbit and having the parts assembled in zero gravity.

Made in Space makes the point that this move could save a great deal of time and money, and eventually this technology could be transplanted to other places like the moon or be used in missions to establish human settlements.

One of Made for Space’s founder, Jason Dunn , said, “It makes perfect sense that we should build everything for space, in space.”

Made for Space was founded after its members attended Singularity University in Ames, a creation by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil that brings leaders and innovative young people together with the goal of developing technology to solve our biggest problems.

Three-D printers are revolutionary in manufacturing--using “feedstock” that resembles “gray goo” and can be made of metal, plastic, and a variety of extraterrestrial potentials such as moon soil.  The printer sequentially deposits the materials to produce objects. Broken parts could be printed out on site instead of being shuttled from Earth, and this would reduce the structure’s mass by 30 percent or so, according to Dunn, because the object wouldn’t have to withstand the high g-force and vibration of launch.

The printers are already able to make small, complex objects that include moving parts. But the company is hoping to begin trials in orbit and begin to show they can build large structures too. "There is a lot of interest in what we’re trying to do,” said Dunn.

Image by nasa.gov