Company That 3D-Prints Houses on Earth Lands Lunar Construction Contract

NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon include giving them someplace roomier to stay than their own spacecraft. NASA is now paying a company to 3D print home structures on Earth, in order for them to be able to use the same technology. 

A contract worth $57.2 million was announced(Opens in a new browser) Tuesday under NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research(Opens in a new browser) program, Austin-based Icon Technology, Inc., will continue previous collaborations with NASA to develop its Project Olympus additive-construction concept(Opens in a new browser) To build structures on the Moon, you can use this system.

The first such structure’s raw material is already on the Moon, in the form of the regolith or the soil surface layer (PDF).(Opens in a new browser)To geologists. NASA’s plans for long-term exploration of the Moon and, eventually, Mars rely heavily on generating needed materials and supplies from what’s on the ground there—what it calls “In situ resource utilization(Opens in a new browser)”—instead of shipping everything from Earth. 

In Icon’s idea, robots will mine regolith for processing by Olympus machines into a material that can then be extruded to create structures that you might think of as exceptionally sci-fi sand castles. 

Icon used the same basic idea, but with trucked in supplies, to 3D print parts of houses all around Austin.(Opens in a new browser). The company also 3D-prints a simulated Mars habitat(Opens in a new browser)This is Mars Dune Alpha(Opens in a new browser), at NASA’s Johnson Space Center outside Houston. 

NASA has spent many years looking into possible uses of 3D printers in spacecraft. It flew the first 3D printer.(Opens in a new browser) In 2014, the International Space Station was used to test its capability to manufacture(Opens in a new browser) As many parts and tools are needed. It launched hardware to the ISS last year to test 3D printing with simulated regolith. 

Although the vision of astronauts leaving footprints on the Moon and then sleeping in 3D-printed shelters is still years away, NASA took a small step toward that goal with the successful launch of its Space Launch System rocket on Nov. 16.

This Artemis 1 mission(Opens in a new browser) Orion has now reached nearly 270,000 miles away from Earth. The capsule, with a payload of such test gear as a computer running a version of Amazon’s Alexa, is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific on Dec. 11.