Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia

3D Printing materials in space or on space colonies would significantly reduce operational and maintenance costs there.

wildcat2030:

Shipping stuff to space is expensive. It’s a significant barrier to any form of manned space exploration, let alone colonization. 3-D printing has been suggested as a way to save on weight — if you need a wrench, you print it out, rather than carrying a wrench. But even 3-D printing requires carrying raw materials. At least, it did. Amit Bandyopadhyay and his collaborators published recently in the Rapid Prototyping Journal an experiment in which they used a high-powered laser to liquefy and 3-D print moon rocks. Well, not moon rocks exactly. NASA sent the team a bunch of fine, black powder that was compositionally similar to what you’d find on the moon, and asked if they could 3-D print it. “We had a system,” says Bandyopadhyay, a professor at Washington State University’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. “Before doing this we did some work with ceramic powders. That was published, and quite successful, so I guess that was the reason we got the call.” Extraterrestrial bodies often contain iron, aluminum, titanium, and other materials that can be extracted from the crust — Planetary Resources, Inc. has even proposed mining an asteroid — but it would be a lot easier and cheaper to use the crust itself as the raw material. That’s a tough proposition because the material often contains a lot of silicon and oxides, and those are hard to melt uniformly. (via Moon-Based 3-D Printers Could Create Tools From Lunar Dust | Wired Design | Wired.com)

(via understandingtheuniverse)