When rockets can no longer hold oversize payloads, building in space might be the best way to go.
A rocket blasts off from the launchpad, carrying a couple dozen tons of cargo into space. In the span of a few minutes, the rocket accelerates to around 17,500 ...
When rockets can no longer hold oversize payloads, building in space might be the best way to go.
A rocket blasts off from the launchpad, carrying a couple dozen tons of cargo into space. In the span of a few minutes, the rocket accelerates to around 17,500 miles per hour, orbiting the Earth at nearly 300 miles above the surface.
What is this rocket carrying? Perhaps a communications satellite, a NASA spacecraft, or some payload for the military? Actually, the rocket isn’t even carrying a spacecraft at all. Instead, its payload contains several tons of high-grade plastic and pre-fabricated components, material that will be fed to a 3D printer waiting in orbit. This futuristic printer will then use the plastic and components to construct a functional satellite spanning several miles.
A mile-wide satellite might sound impossible, but that’s exactly where the space industry is headed. In the future, giant telescopes, communication satellites, solar arrays, and space stations will fill the space around the Earth, and many of them will be several times larger than anything ever built on the surface.
Space Lego
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, "Made In Space" is working to make that dream a reality. For the past few years, they’ve operated the Additive Manufacturing Facility, one of the only 3D printers in space. While the AMF sits comfortably aboard the International Space Station, Made In Space has plans to launch a new printer that would operate exclusively in the vacuum of space.
Their prototype, called Archinaut, is
scheduled to launch later this year
. Future machines like Archinaut will be able to print nearly everything in orbit—where there’s no limit on size.
“We can manufacture a structure that couldn’t support its own mass if it were on Earth,” says Made In Space CEO Andrew Rush. “The only practical limitation you have is how much material you’re providing to the system.”
The first Archinaut prototype is mostly just a proof-of-concept and won't be constructing mile-wide satellites anytime soon. “First you crawl, then you walk, then you run,” says Rush. “We’ll start out with manufacturing space-optimized trusses and booms and reflectors to provide a supply capability that we can’t currently achieve.” But once this tech gets off the ground, it can be used to build structures as big as their owners want them.
There are plenty of technical challenges to overcome, too, says Rudranarayan Mukherjee, a robotics expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Autonomy, manipulation, perception, force control, metrology” are all areas where our robots need to improve. A robot needs to see what it’s doing and delicately piece together components with little or no human oversight.
Satellites and other space structures also have to be completely redesigned, says Mukherjee. “When you talk about making things in space, you have to have interfaces that are standardized and tested for that environment, that provide structural aspects, communication, power lines have to be redesigned, as well as thermal aspects.”
Spacecraft parts have to come together like Lego, fitting in all sorts of combinations while simultaneously providing electrical and data connections.
This is the heart of what Rush is trying to do. He believes that in a few decades, space-based manufacturing is going to be “fundamentally transformative.”
Once these technologies make it possible to construct extremely large structures in space, plenty of people will want to build them. Rush mentions “reflectors that are larger than the International Space Station,” as well as “very long antennas,” as practical structures that are widely useful and easy to build.
What Comes Next?
The possibilities for in-space assembly and manufacturing are nearly unlimited. This is a true “if you can dream it, you can do it” type of scenario. But the technology is still very much in its infancy, with the first prototype device still stuck on the ground.
But in a sense, we already know what the impact is going to be because we’ve done it before. The first large in-space assembly project began twenty years ago with the construction of the International Space Station. The ISS is the largest structure ever built in space, and it was done without any fancy robots or 3D printers.
The impact of this single space-assembled structure has been enormous. The impact of any future space-assembled or space-built structure would be even more so.
No one knows for sure what the future of space exploration will look like, but there’s a very good chance it’ll be built there.
Source:
Popular Mechanics
