Company That 3D-Prints Houses on Earth Lands Lunar Construction Contract

NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon include giving them someplace roomier to stay than their own spacecraft. NASA is now paying a company to 3D print home structures on Earth, in order for them to be able to use the same technology. 

An announcement of a contract for $57.2 Million(Opens in new window) Tuesday under NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research(Opens in new window) program, Austin-based Icon Technology, Inc., will continue previous collaborations with NASA to develop its Project Olympus additive-construction concept(Opens in new window) To build structures on the Moon, you can use this system.

The first such structure’s raw material is already on the Moon, in the form of the regolith or the soil surface layer (PDF).(Opens in new window)Geologists can also contact them at ( NASA’s plans for long-term exploration of the Moon and, eventually, Mars rely heavily on generating needed materials and supplies from what’s on the ground there—what it calls “In situ resource utilization(Opens in new window)”—instead of shipping everything from Earth. 

In Icon’s idea, robots will mine regolith for processing by Olympus machines into a material that can then be extruded to create structures that you might think of as exceptionally sci-fi sand castles. 

Icon uses the same concept but with trucked-in materials to 3D-print parts for houses in Austin.(Opens in new window). A simulated Mars habitat is being 3D printed by the company.(Opens in new window)This is Mars Dune Alpha(Opens in new window), at NASA’s Johnson Space Center outside Houston. 

NASA has spent many years looking into possible uses of 3D printers in spacecraft. It flew the first 3D printer.(Opens in new window) In 2014, the International Space Station was used to test its capability to manufacture(Opens in new window) Parts and tools available as required. It sent hardware to the ISS last spring to test 3D printers using simulated regolith. 

It’s still years away that astronauts will leave footprints on the Moon, then set up camp in 3D-printed shelters. But NASA made a small step towards this goal on Nov. 16, when it successfully launched its Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule on an uncrewed test flight around the Moon.

This Artemis 1 mission(Opens in new window) Orion reached a distance of almost 270,000 miles from Earth Monday. The capsule, with a payload of such test gear as a computer running a version of Amazon’s Alexa, is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific on Dec. 11.