ICON
This isn’t just science fiction anymore.” The words of Dr. Amit Bandyopadhyay of Washington State University as we begin our conversation over Zoom. Bandyopadhyay has been a professor at the university since 1997, and in 2008 had a paper published about ceramic 3D printing. The paper did not get much attention from the wider AM industry at the time, but NASA got in touch and asked if the team would be interested in 3D printing with Lunar regolith, which Bandyopadhyay and his team successfully achieved in 2011. Regolith, for those that don't know, is a blanket of dust and broken rocks that sits atop a layer of bedrock on a planet.
The price of taking payloads into orbit can be astronomical (no pun intended), with costs of tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But 3D printing with regolith and other materials found locally on the Moon or even on Mars to manufacture parts saves weight and money for organisations such as NASA and SpaceX.
3D printing with Lunar regolith can be a challenge, as parts that are 100% printed in the material can be very brittle, with lots of air bubbles and porosities. The next step forward after Lunar regolith for Bandyopadhyay and his team was to 3D print with simulated Martian regolith, which when combined with titanium in the right mix, can create a material that exhibits better properties than titanium alone.
Bandyopadhyay told TCT: “Instead of making 100% metal parts, we can use the regolith, the locally available material, blend it with the metal and actually produce something. People have tried with plastic, and you can make something similar with plastic, but they might not have the highest strength. The final part that we produced has between 5 to 10% regolith, but another aspect we looked at is making a coating. You have a metallic surface that’s wear and tear is very high, but you can coat the entire surface with a hard ceramic, such as the Martian regolith, and it can be used as a radiation shield and become a high wear and tear resistant material.
“But if you want to make something that is functional, you need to drop the ceramic content or regolith content down, so that it has enough strength and does not fall apart or is brittle. We have been doing this for many years, most of our work is in metals and ceramics, and it is exciting, spicy work, it is something different. I still feel that there is a lot of potential. Someone needs to do something otherwise our missions will fail, because we need to have some kind of manufacturing in outer space.”
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Possibilities that are opened up by the idea of 3D printing with Lunar or Martian based materials include the creation of habitats that would allow people to live on other planets. Construction 3D printing company ICON was awarded a 57.2 million USD contract from NASA in 2022 to develop a Lunar 3D printing construction system, as part of a joint goal to create the first ever construction on another planetary body. The contract builds upon previous NASA and Department of Defense funding for ICON’s ‘Project Olympus’, which aims to develop space-based construction systems to support the planned exploration of the Moon and beyond, using local Lunar and Martian resources as building materials.
In ICON’s press release announcing the NASA contract, Jason Ballard, ICON Co-Founder and CEO, said: “To change the space exploration paradigm from ‘there and back again’ to ‘there to stay’, we’re going to need robust, resilient, and broadly capable systems that can use the local resources of the moon and other planetary bodies. We’re pleased that our research and engineering to-date demonstrated that such systems are indeed possible, and we look forward to now making that possibility a reality. The final deliverable of this contract will be humanity’s first construction on another world, and that is going to be a pretty special achievement.”
Speaking about the practicality of making the idea of a 3D printed habitat on Mars a reality, Bandyopadhyay told TCT: “The printer needs to function right. So here on Earth, there’s an abundance of electricity available, you can have a high powered laser and you can print something very easily, but when you are on the Moon’s surface or on the surface of Mars, you’re talking about solar power. To make a printer that functions the way that it would here, the power aspect is a big challenge.”
When asked about the significance of the 57.2 million USD contract awarded to ICON, Dr. Bandyopadhyay said: “I’m very excited. I was involved with some of the people who were trying to make it happen early on, now it’s a very large operation, with many, many people involved. If you think of the first 3D printer on the International Space Station, it was printing just a plastic part, but that is also a game changer. These are the small steps that show the confidence and the trust that the government has not only in the technology, but also in the organisations that I think can deliver something. Nothing is 100% guaranteed, but the point is it shows that we have reached a point where we believe this is possible. We believe this is doable, we believe that not 20, 30, 40 years from today, in the next five years we will see something like this happening. Fifteen years back, maybe we are thinking about Mars maybe one day. Today, we are talking about Mars in the next 10 to 12 years. Some of the things that are coming together and making it possible, and we are no longer just talking about the International Space Station, and just doing experiments and things of that nature, we are actually talking about going to the Moon and landing there again. And maybe that’s a temporary base, maybe Mars is the next step.”
Metal additive manufacturing company Incus is also exploring the area of 3D printing with resources found in outer space. In July 2023, the company announced that an 18-month-long collaboration with the European Space Agency had resulted in a successful project focused on 3D printing for the Lunar environment. A joint effort alongside prime contractor OHB System AG set out to establish the possibility of a zero-waste workflow using Lunar resources and scrap materials recovered from old missions or satellite debris, eventually contaminated by Lunar dust, to 3D print spare parts using Incus’ Lithography-based Metal Manufacturing (LMM).
The aim of the project was to show that creating a sustainable human base on the Moon is feasible, as the idea of leveraging Lunar manufacturing to support a human habitat is generally considered a challenge due to factors like atmosphere, gravity, temperature, radiation and the potential contamination of moon dust.
Incus CEO Dr. Gerald Miteramskogler told TCT: “To transform Lunar resources and scrap materials into 3D printable material, we’ve employed a commercially available, compact, and flexible gas atomiser unit. This unit recycles these materials, converting them into metal powders with an average particle size of 10 microns. To demonstrate this capability, we’ve utilised titanium recovered from an old aircraft structure. Since 1959, the scientific community has estimated the presence of approximately 187,400 kilograms of materials from artificial objects on the Lunar surface.”
Speaking to TCT about what the next steps are to achieve the Lunar 3D printing goals of Incus, Miteramskogler said: “Following the successful project, there are still several essential steps to be taken in order to establish a fully functional 3D printing process for lunar operations, and we are eager to continue our efforts in this direction. The ESA project allowed us to demonstrate the feasibility of recycling scrap materials using LMM and highlighted the flexibility and resilience of our process in handling various raw materials. Building upon these achievements, we are now expanding our printer sizes to provide a solution for mass manufacturing using AM. We will be unveiling our Hammer Pro40 production printer at this year’s Formnext event. With this new system, I firmly believe that AM will play a significant role in addressing pressing challenges here on Earth.”
Miteramskogler also spoke about the importance of getting the chemistry of the materials used for 3D printing in outer space right. The Incus CEO told TCT: “It is crucial to consider the entire field of material science when evaluating test results. While impurities can enhance a material’s strength, this often comes at the cost of reduced flexibility, potentially resulting in increased brittleness. This, in turn, may lead to decreased longterm performance and reduced fatigue strength. Altered material properties might be suitable for everyday items in a lunar colony, such as cutlery or single-use surgical equipment. However, for technical or high-performance components like dental implants, tools or fittings, achieving the ideal chemistry of the material remains essential.”
