Made in Space demonstrates 3D printing in a thermal vacuum
Made in Space, the 3D-printing company that has a two-year, $20m contract with NASA, has demonstrated the ability of its Archinaut technology to print objects in a thermal vacuum chamber that simulates the conditions of printing beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Made in Space envisages sending a 3D printer with robot arms into space that can be used to print and assemble satellites, telescopes and habitat modules in orbit, removing the need to build them on Earth and launch them on a rocket. Made in Space has already been 3D printing on the International Space Station using a different device.
Space is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care that it’ll freeze you to death unless you’re wearing a fancy suit, or that even before freezing you’ll suffocate in its vacuum. And it certainly doesn’t care how difficult it is for humans to get stuff done in the void: practical things like screwing in bolts and drinking water and 3-D printing replacement parts.

But a company called Made in Space is indifferent to space’s indifference. In a first, it’s showed that it can 3-D print in a thermal vacuum chamber, which simulates the nastiness of space. It’s a milestone in the outfit’s ambitious Archinaut program, which hopes to launch a 3-D printer with robot arms into orbit. You know, to build things like satellites and telescopes and stuff.

This 3-D printer works like one you'd buy for yourself, extruding layer upon layer of polymer to build a structure. The difference being, this (deep breath...) Extended Structure Additive Manufacturing Machine is encased for thermal control, just like the components of a communications satellite would be to protect the electronics. “Our tactic has been, let's control the environment that's inside the printer, because we can't do anything about what's outside,” says Eric Joyce, project manager of Archinaut.

The challenge is that Archinaut will have to print out tubes far larger than itself—which means the machine needs an aperture to spit out its creations. But that would expose its insides to the freezing vacuum as it's printing. So Joyce and the team selected components that are low outgassing, meaning they don't lose material in a vacuum. "There's nothing proprietary in our selection process," Joyce says. "Just good engineering." If all goes according to plan, one day Archinaut's robotic arms will use machine vision to grab printed parts as they leave the machine, then piece them together into satellites or dishes.

There's one thing space does to make this job easier: Up there, Archinaut's printed structures would be able to grow to incredible size without collapsing into a cloud of space junk. That and individual rods can be extra long without snapping. On Thursday, Made in Space showed off a 100-foot, 20-pound beam the team had printed (though not in a vacuum), strung from the ceiling at its NASA Ames Research Center office. That’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here.

Why go to all this trouble for an orbital 3-D printer? Right now, the stuff we put into space is limited by the rockets we use to launch them. If you want to put a satellite in orbit, it has to be small enough to cram into the nose of a rocket. It also has to withstand the insane forces of the launch. And then there's the problem of weight: If your object is too massive, it'll never get into orbit. That and it'll cost you $10,000 or more a pound to get your goods on a rocket in the first place.

But if engineers could build satellites in orbit, they’d be free of size limitations. They could construct not only bigger satellites, but bigger telescopes as well. And the bigger your telescope, the more power you have to peer ever further into the cosmos.