Space technology and research related to it have often been very complex, compound and in short not easy.Different difficulties while in manufacturing, launching or even while reaching in space have been observed while through our journey to space. But all these efforts have helped us to learn from them and make more better and effective machines and technology capable of least threat to the mission and auto repairable. Since our first space flight in late 50’s and then landing of first manual flight in the second half of 60’s gave all the hard work and dedication and a true payoff. Since then we humans have been into this space business and have been putting more of our efforts in building these technologies both with ideas and thus with much better implementation. But along with these , development of other new techniques of manufacturing and building new things also came across all these years. Man’s Dream to build homes on the moon and a proper base on it along with the same on Mars is the next big mission of the space agencies, especially like NASA and Spacex. But for all these we do require to make a proper base at these places so that humans could start the initial processes and thus the dream becomes a reality.
But the main issue which surely is interfering in the mission is “How to set up base on these places knowing the difficulties involved with it”. It’s difficult to carry building material from our surface to these for obvious reasons. Then what could be the best thing which were can do to overcome these troubling factors. When these companies were thoroughly entangled with this issue, a company name “MadeInSpace” came up with a brilliant idea which could be used to solve the problem of carrying loads and building materials to space and also much manual work. They came up with the idea of 3-d printing. 3-D printing is a technique used these days to manufacture things just by giving the command to the machine and with the help of plastic , metal, carbon fiber, and many more.
The idea of 3-d printing came in early 70’s and was brought into practice by 1980’s.in this printing, a design of any object is made using the software and then this printing machine creates the object by just printing out the shape by laying layer after layer so as to obtain the desired shape. There were numerous benefits of this printing observed which included:
- Economical
- Accuracy in shape
- Took less time for manufacturing.
- Difficult designs could easily be manufactured.
- Durable
- Better quality and finishing of object
- Reducing the risk of manufacturing as less manual power is used
- Reduction in wasting of material
- And many more
This technology significantly brought a change in production of objects and their quality. So made in space brought up the idea of manufacturing of these space based and various tools through 3-d printing. The idea was revolutionary but still the agencies doubted on the efficiency and working of these machines in space. Sp for this, as in collaboration with MadeInSpace sent a 3-d machine in 2014 . The machine manufactured the object from plastic which was from earth and regolith which is the powder rock and the objects were commanded to be printed. And the mission was successful as strong objects were able to be printed. So this technique made it very easy to set up base or anything easy to be made in space and thus reducing the material required to be sent for manufacturing them. This truly is beneficial as the moon soils rock Regolith which is converted into powder form, thus we just need to send plastic material which wood be mixed with the regolith and would be passed on through a heated nozzle to get the desired shape.
“With the help of this technique it would be feasible for us to send things in space which could manufacture and assemble themselves. These are truly revolutionary technologies which truly will open our approach to space, along with different possibilities, new adventures and certain different problems which might even be solved soon in the future with other better ideas and technologies”.
International Journal of Research (IJR) 