Astronauts Could Build Base On The Moon Out Of Lunar Dust
Posted by Justin on April 17th, 2010
Hey space fans, don’t be blue that Mean Ol’ Obama said we aren’t sending men to the moon anytime soon. Because once we get there… our pad is going to be totally sick thanks to a new 3-D printing technology that could turn boring lunar dust and moon rocks into a bomb ass base of operations.
Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.
The print-on-demand technology, known as D-Shape, could save on launch and transportation costs for manned missions to the moon. But the concept must first prove itself in exploratory tests funded by the European Space Agency (ESA)
“We will make very basic printing trials in a vacuum environment to verify if this is possible,” said Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite UK Ltd and creator of D-Shape.
Dini’s D-Shape has created full-size sandstone buildings on Earth by using a 3-D printing process similar to how inkjet printers work. It adds a special inorganic binder to sand so that it can build a structure from the bottom up, one layer at a time.
Totally sweet.
[Yahoo!]
Twitter this
April 18th, 2010 at 10:20 am
So the moon would look like Tatooine? Cool