NASA Makes 3-D Printed Wrench Model Available

First time accepted submitter smsiebe writes You can now download a piece of history by getting the designs for the wrench that NASA recently emailed to astronauts on the ISS. The wrench took four hours to complete and was the first "uplink tool" printed in space. You can check out a number of models and images on NASA's 3D Resources site.

Comments

Let's Be Honest

[Frosty Piss]

When International Space Station Commander Barry Wilmore needed a wrench, NASA knew just what to do. They "e-mailed" him one.

They make it sound like "Woah! I need a wrench and I don't have it! What ever will I do?"

Clearly, however, this was a fully planned experiment, and it is doubtful that the wrench was used a the sole tool for some important fix. The wrench will come back with the crew and be studied in a laboratory as I'm sure was planned from the beginning.

Impressive none the less, but let's be honest here.

Re:Let's Be Honest

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a "3D printing has brought the entire species to the post-scarcity/replicator era" story. There is no place for reality, rationality, or skepticism.

Please report to your nearest Luddite reprogramming booth, itself naturally 3D printed.

Re: Let's Be Honest

[Frosty Piss]

Ayn Rand wrote...

And that's where I stopped reading...

Amazing design

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual design of the wrench is fantastic; it has two moving parts that are printed inside the grip, so it comes out of the printer fully assembled and ready to be used (or not used).

Re:Amazing design

[MobyDisk]

I'm sure they already have a 3/8" socket set on board, so this was just a test.

Actually they didn't. The Americans looked everywhere: they asked the Russians, Canadians, Brazilians, and Japanese, but all they could find were 9.5mm!

Re:Need a wrench

[Irate Engineer]

$10,000-$20,000, same as the first one. It currently costs about $10,000 per pound to get anything to low Earth orbit.. Doesn't matter if it is a wrench or a can of ham salad or toilet paper - $10,000 per lb. You have to put the thing on a pricey rocket to get it to orbit. If you go to Mars, things get even more expensive.

This work that they are doing on the "Irrelevant Space Stopgap" is the stuff that they need to figure out before we can get to Mars or beyond. We have to sort out parts and tools and make sure that the astronauts can get their hands on what they need to get the job done and go to these places. Yes, it's a lot of seemingly basic and mundane crap, but it needs to be done and it is being done on the ISS today. There isn't a Tractor Supply on Phobos (not to my knowledge, anyway).