What is NASA’s 3D Printed Habitat Challenge?
To put humans on Mars, NASA is going to need new technologies. The challenge aims to tap unconventional sources to create that tech: we’re reaching out to makers, hackers, innovators, artists, scientists, hobbyists, retirees – pretty much anybody – and offering several million-dollar prizes.
What are you asking people to do?
Ultimately we want a 3D printer that we can send to Mars to build habitats for astronauts, using only the materials found on the planet’s surface and recycled plastic. For NASA’s human journey to Mars, expected in the 2030s, we must take everything that we need with us or use what’s there – we call this “zero mass exploration”.
As we fly out and the astronauts consume their food, the plastic packaging is left over, as is the packaging of various experiments. Once we get to Mars, we’ll have an abundance of it. So one aspect of the challenge will be to combine plastic with regolith – Martian soil – and demonstrate that you can print with these two materials. Another aspect is to 3D print an actual residence large enough to house four astronauts.
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How might this building material be made?
The plastic might be used as a glue or binding agent for the regolith. Or instead of heating and squirting materials like a conventional 3D printer, somebody might use a laser’s heat to fuse the regolith itself, to solidify it, with plastic simply used as aggregate. Anything is possible. The really nice thing about the surface of Mars, and the moon, is that the rock and soil is already loose and in a condition to be used immediately – it’s merely a matter of shovelling it up. For our challenge, we’ll provide an analogue of this regolith.
Shelter is one thing, but what about the other necessities people need to survive, such as oxygen and water?
People don’t always realise this, but it’s not so much that there’s a lack of oxygen in a spacecraft or habitat, it’s that you have too much carbon dioxide. So the issue is to scrub out the CO2 and free the oxygen. Then there’s water recycling. NASA’s environmental control life-support systems focus mostly on water recycling, and so you always hear these stories of how NASA is recycling urine to drink. And, yes, we do that. But with zero mass exploration, you need to get 100 per cent recyclability, which means you can’t afford to lose 2 per cent of your water by not extracting it from solid human waste. How do you get that water out? That’s something we’ll have to address for extended missions like a trip to Mars.
Alien worlds aside, it’s fair to say that lots of people need shelter on Earth…
Whenever we develop a new competition we try to make sure that there’s an application here on Earth. We have plenty of waste plastics, and we have plenty of rocks we could crush up. If we can create technology to print with just plastic and rocks, imagine the possibilities. We could make anything from houses to doghouses.
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Sam Ortega is a systems engineer who manages NASA’s Centennial Challenges, which encourage creative people everywhere to develop novel aerospace technology. He is based at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama
This article appeared in print under the headline “3D print a home on Mars”
