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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH5EErE8QnI
Someone needs to update from 8-bit mission plans!
http://www.space.com/27211-made-in-space-3d-printer.html/
It's ABS, and quite small. It's more for testing than anything else, but they say they intend to print functional items rather than just toys.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
In Boeing's defense, it's b-o-e-i-n-g, not 'boing'. A trampoline was never being considered.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Redundancy, and 3D printers that can make all the parts for new 3D printers. Even if two of your three printers fail, use the third to build two more and hopefully the two that fail can be cannibalized for spare parts enough to build a complete working model.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper? You think 3D printers use plastic pellets?
Have you ever seen a 3D printer in action in the last few years? They use plastic filament and can print upside-down without any problems. The fumes can probably be eliminated by using an enclosed printing space with a filtered exhaust, and the toxicity of the fumes lowered by using PLA instead of ABS.
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I'd expect that from eight year olds, not adults.
Perhaps the problem is that you've lost hold of what makes 8-year-olds so delightful? There was a cynical curmudgeon about just about every technological advance throughout human history, and despite that flight is routine and inexpensive. Horseless carriages clog the roads. Skyscrapers crown cities. Nuclear reactors pump out gigawatts of electricity. Ships the size of skyscrapers ply the seas carrying stuff built by robots. We carry some significant percentage of all human knowledge in our pockets. At every step, there were doubters. You are that guy now.
If you want to manufacture stuff in space, you can't just jump right to space foundries and space smelters. Baby steps.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Was that another way of saying "free fall"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Launch costs are still falling. Technology is still improving. The technology is almost ready to colonise mars now - all that is lacking is the collective will to spend several trillion dollars and more than a few lives on mega-project that would take centuries to complete. That's a socio-political problem, not a technological one.
Why did we go to the moon? It was hugely expensive and the only benefit it brought was a slightly better understanding of the formation of the solar system based on recovered samples. We went because there was a political drive: A need to one-up the Russians (And develop better ICBM engines as a bonus). Why do we not go back? Because the drive is gone now, and the cost-benefits analysis was never favorable without that non-rational justification. It's quite conceivable that it could be reignited, perhaps by a popular movement or perhaps by a change in political situation. If China were to establish even a small manned outpost on moon or mars, for example, it would create immediate pressure on the rest of the world to join in the game once again. If sixties-tech can get a man to the moon and back, think what modern technology could do with the materials and design refinements available now.
I expect some minor refinements to the chemistry could reduce the fumes from PLA considerably. PLA isn't just PLA - it's got other things mixed in. Plasticisers, dye, stabiliser, etc.
Thanks for the link, I was curious about that, too. "RapidScat" sounds like what I do after chili night.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
This time, they launched without the landing legs, but since they are still testing above water that does not matter a lot. Deploying the legs and soft landing on water have been tried successfully already, so I imagine they could test other things like partially flying back to the launching site, fuel permitting. The twitters are silent, so far, however.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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.
Yes, melting plastic in a closed environment. Brilliant. Instead of planning for their little hobby-jump in Low Earth Orbit, let's bring a cranky, tiny toy to make coat hangers... (in free-fall LOL). I just love the armchair engineers and programmers here going on about the 3D printer will be this tool to help colonize the universe..
It's baffling to me where this nonsense comes from. I'd expect that from eight year olds, not adults.
But then again, simple math and reality in the video game generation is too much to ask for, I guess.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
We don't even have the Concorde anymore, and you loons are talking about going outside the Solar System as if it's even remotely possible. The only propositions you have are decades-old fantasies.
Reality isn't going away. You're not going anywhere. Not you, not me, not your kids, not their kids, and not whatever will replace us in a hundred thousand years... Evolution is still happening, you know.
As opposed to the idiot who's pretty sure that the actual engineers and scientists involved in building the device, planning its mission and experiments on the ISS, and then putting it in an actual rocket and launching it into space...didn't consider all of this?
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.
I said 'almost.' If you assume money is no issue, getting things there is doable - been done for robots, just needs scaling up. Landing large structures without parachutes (Mars atmosphere is very thing) has been done too - lunar lander module. Higher gravity poses some issue, but doable. What remains is long-term-independant life support systems - something capable of running for years between resupplies. That we don't have the technology for, yet. But it doesn't require any new physics - no need for anyone to invent a warp drive. Just refinements to existing approaches. A colony would be insanely expensive, I can agree - you're looking at sending tens of tons of equipment and supplies ahead before you even send the first humans, so they can arrive to find a generous stockpile of spare parts, construction equipment and tanks of life support supplies. Then many manned missions, each bringing along new structures to deploy (Many of which will require much digging and earthmoving, so you're going to be sending heavy construction machines too, all designed to operate in martian atmosphere). All of which is to absolutely no commercial benefit at all. The question isn't "Could we colonise mars?" The question is "Who in the hell is going to donate enough money to bankrupt a superpower with no payoff at the end?" If money weren't an issue, experts could start planning tomorrow and have the first unmanned prepatory missions on their way in five years.
That's why I drew comparison to the moon landing. Because it was pointless. There was no commercial reason to go. No military reason to go. Minimal scientific reason to go. There was no reason at all, beyond raising the national middle finger at communism. And yet, we went anyway. That's the kind of reckless stupidity it would take to make manned space exploration or settling possible: Screw the rationality, we go because it's cool, and because we can't let the other superpower steal the prestige. It's happened once, so there is always the possibility it will happen again.
Its launched on top of an Atlas V which uses Russian RD-180 engines. Next.
A trampoline was never being considered.
Except by the Russians. Sort of.
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