Aspiring engineers may gain access to the International Space Station’s (ISS) 3D printer through a new competition to design objects for microgravity 3D printing. The winning university team of Print the Future will collaborate with Made in Space — the company behind the ISS’s Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF) — to refine its design before having the object printed aboard the ISS and sent back down to Earth.
Design concepts are expected to help address space endeavors such as interplanetary transport, construction, and habitation.
The competition itself is a collaboration between organizations from diverse backgrounds, including nonprofit educator Enterprise in Space (EIS), engineering consultant Prairie Nanotechnology, publishing platforms Sketchfab and 3D Hubs, and higher educator the Kepler Space Institute.
“The Print the Future competition was inspired in part by the mission of EIS’ parent organization, the National Space Society, which seeks to see people living and working in thriving communities beyond the Earth,” EIS founder, Shawn Case, told Digital Trends.
With Made in Space’s commercial 3D printer now installed on the ISS, it may be more practical to print objects in space rather than launch them up there. The competition organizers hope entrants will develop viable designs for this microgravity manufacturing.
Print the Future is the second competition spearheaded by EIS. Last year, the organization selected three winners in its Enterprise in Space Orbiter Design Contest, which challenged contestants to design science fiction-inspired spacecraft that would then be built and launched into Earth’s orbit and that would carry — and carry out — over 100 student experiments.
“Our hope is that some of the world’s most gifted university and postgraduate students will come up with designs for cutting-edge ideas that will help humanity flourish in space,” Case said.
Print the Future is accepting submissions until February 15, 2017 with the ten semi-finalists announced a month later. Winners will be chosen by April 15.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.