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How 3D Printing Could Help Keep the ISS In Orbit
Despite all the best intentions and meticulous overengineering, some of the equipment on spacecraft like the ISS inevitably breaks. An anonymous reader poses the question "Why carry out a very expensive launch into space to resupply the ISS, when astronauts could just manufacture replacement parts themselves?" Startup Made in Space is working on a space-oriented 3D printing system to make it easy to transmit the information needed to pop out complex shapes (as might be in delicate mechanical systems), but the founders are also talking about using 3D printers to jump-start construction if humans extend their presence from the Earth to other planets (or revisit the moon).
It's a pretty cool way to manufacture things when you need them - no question there. Will this device be able to use it's own excess waste after making something? Will we have to ship tons of materials up only to ditch some large percentage of waste?
I like the general concept here, but it isn't much more sustainable than sending up supplies.
you still need to send up the raw material.
now cool would be to make 3Dprinters work with materials refine-able from the surface of the moon or mars.
instead of sending a new probe every few years, send a "Maker"
it would have two parts.
gatherer and a factory(with the 3Dprinter).
transmit the new plans and away it goes.
just thinking and rambling
call it Thrambling
For the love of GOD I hope you're talking about the Star Trek kind, not the Stargate kind of Replicator.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They're starting to use 3d printing in aircraft parts because they can print more complex, lighter and stronger shapes with the printers. This is being done with metal.
However, I've absolutely no doubt that the machines that are doing it are not the sort of thing that you'll be able to put on the ISS.
The moon, on the other hand, that's something worth considering.
I realize that with the activities of the "for the children!" Groups out there that it is easy to presume everything is made of plastic these days, but this simply isn't true.
I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of the innards of the ISS's superstructure is mostly made from 2024 or 7075 aluminum alloy, sprayed with hexavalent cromium primer.
Those are the two most commonly used aluminum alloys used in aerospace fabrication (I make prints citing them all the time at work), and for strength reasons these need to be heat treated in most circumstances after being formed or milled. A powder or paste based prototype printer just won't be able to produce these alloys, because the desired mechanical properties are a result of the metalurgical crystaline structures present in them after annealing and heat treating. That is, unless you want to ship a whole annealing oven and solution heat treatment system up there... (just so you know, that equipment isn't light.)
For composite materials, conventional heat shaped plastics are not common either. Usually a thermally cured resin material is used, such as with phenolic, or with carbon fiber composite. Doing thse in space would be a nightmare, since not only do you deal with a sticky, honey like liquid with toxic fumes, and the curing oven, you also need a vacuum bag machine and the finished product must be sanded, creating tiny (toxic) particles to float around the ventilation system.
I could see a prototype maching puking out ceramic paste parts prior to electric kilning, or plastic parts, but not the main structural parts made from alloy or composites.
I don't see the justification for the added launch expense of bringing one and its consumables along.
Even if this project isn't necessary (or more useful than alternatives), it is totally worth doing for its own sake. The ISS should launch the era of space based manufacturing. That R&D will give us a huge jump into issues of microgravity and orbital mechanics, as well as 100% recycling/reuse of manufacturing byproducts. But it will also move forward both automated and remote manufacturing, especially of short-run items, that will improve manufacturing here on Earth.
It will give us a reason to exploit the nearby near-vacuum, and other local environment resources (eg. direct solar - in large quantities, but also causing very high temperature gradients in light/shade). Hard radiation and solar wind could help us make things that are impossible or prohibitively expensive on Earth. And it will also create demand for harvesting planetoid resources, whether the Moon, asteroids or other interplanetary matter. Which will bootstrap the further exploitation of the solar system.
Space-based manufacturing is how we should make the things that we disperse around the solar system, instead of launching the matter out of Earth's gravity well. We should be launching only what we need to make devices that make things. We should be able to transmit data and instructions for making new machines, some of which will take new data and instructions for making newer machines. Some of these machines can be very large - like other orbital stations, or other probes to launch. We should get started making things in orbit that can be landed on the Moon to start a base there, exploiting Lunar materials for further manufacturing.
And all of these improvements will bring better manufacturing back to Earth, even if only in lessons learned.
The ISS was worth doing for its own sake. What an achievement! It inspires the world. But now that it's largely completed, it should be our platform for projects that aren't an end in themselves. Moving humanity's tool use into effective use and occupation of the extraterrestrial neighborhood will be a vast dividend that will never stop paying us back.
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make install -not war