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SpaceX Launches Supplies to ISS, Including Its First 3D Printer
A "flawless" launch early Sunday from Cape Canaveral has sent a load of supplies on its way to the International Space Station aboard a Falcon 9-lofted SpaceX Dragon capsule. Food, care packages and provisions for NASA's astronauts make up more than a third of the cargo onboard Dragon. But the spacecraft also has experiments and equipment that will eventually help scientists complete 255 research projects in total, according to NASA. In Dragon's trunk, there's an instrument dubbed RapidScat, which will be installed outside the space station to measure the speed and direction of ocean winds on Earth. Among the commercially funded experiments onboard Dragon is a materials-science test from the sports company Cobra Puma Golf designed to build a stronger golf club.
Dragon is also hauling the first space-grade 3D printer, built by Made in Space, which will test whether the on-the-spot manufacturing technology is viable without gravity.
I actually don't care for this modern 3d printer hype, but this is one of the few places where I could see a 3d printer being particularly useful.
Thing is, you're melting plastic and placing that melted plastic where you want it to be. In gravity and endless atmosphere this is easy, the gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper and ensure that the plastic stays where you place it, and the essentially endless atmosphere carries away noxious fumes so that you don't poison yourself. Unfortunately on a space station or in a spacecraft you have no effective gravity and a very limited atmosphere, so you cannot pollute nor can you rely on gravity to make things go where you want them.
Consider the effort and design that goes into the toilet. A simple act that humans have always done on Earth is not so simple in space, and millions of dollars have been spent to account for biology designed to function with gravity assistance when that gravity is not available.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I never said that it would help colonize the universe.
I expect that it'll be useful when that plastic tab on that rocker switch that's used all of the time breaks off, so they an print themselves a replacement instead of waiting weeks or months for a resupply mission to bring them one, or when an astronaut realizes that a particular control stick or other device is causing skin abrasions, so they could design and print a different one that doesn't cause sores, or any of a whole set of times when a spaceman needs some small, insignificant-on-earth part that is literally worth its weight in gold because they just don't have access to it.
I could even see circumstances in an Apollo-Thirteen kind of accident where engineers at NASA could come up with a fix that's safer and more reliable than duct-taping some plastic sheeting to a bulkhead because the tech to manufacture a few parts exists with those that need those parts.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The technology is almost ready to colonise mars now
Not quite. With a lot of effort and a huge budget, we may be able to get a man on the surface, but that's a far cry from colonisation.