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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the give-me-a-rover-with-a-long-enough-arm-and-I-will-build-a-world dept.

AI SpaceFactory was named the final winner in NASA's competition to use 3D printing technology to build a habitat that could be used on the Moon or Mars.

AI SpaceFactory will receive $500,000 for winning the competition with second-place Penn State receiving $200,000.

The winning habitat, called Marsha, is tall and slim, to reduce the need for construction rovers on unfamiliar terrain, according to AI SpaceFactory. It is designed to be built on a vertically telescoping arm attached to a rover, which stays still during construction.

Marsha was built using a biopolymer basalt composite, "a biodegradable and recyclable material derived from natural materials found on Mars." It proved superior to concrete in NASA's pressure, smoke, and impact testing.

The final stage of the competition ran from May 1 through May 4 in Peoria Illinois in partnership with Bradley University and was hosted by Caterpillar inc.. Other sponsors included Bechtel, Brick & Mortar Ventures and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The competition was part of NASA's Centenial Challenges program. Which also includes the

        Cube Quest Challenge
        Space Robotics Challenge
        Vascular Tissue Challenge
        CO₂ Conversion Challenge

We developed these technologies for Space, but they have the potential to transform the way we build on Earth," said David Malott, CEO and Founder of AI SpaceFactory. "By using natural, biodegradable materials grown from crops, we could eliminate the building industry's massive waste of unrecyclable concrete and restore our planet.

AI SpaceFactory plans to adapt Marsha's design for an eco-friendly Earth habitat called Tera; a crowdfunding campaign will begin shortly on IndieGogo, the design agency said in a statement.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:43PM (11 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:43PM (#842679) Homepage
    What wind? For that, you'd need an atmosphere, which the moon completely lacks, and mars has so little of there's no point in trying to pretend that going there to live makes any goddamn sense at all.

    Can "we're never going to live on mars" be my equivalent of Gaaark's dark matter rant?
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 12 2019, @03:13PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 12 2019, @03:13PM (#842690) Journal

    "My battery is low and it's getting dark"

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:15PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:15PM (#842699) Journal

    If you'd said "We're never going to Terraform Mars" I'd probably agree with you. Living there is a different matter. I happen to thing it's the wrong place, but most people seem fixated on planets, and at least on Mars you could build a beanstalk. It might take awhile, of course, because you need a lot of traffic to justify it.

    Space habitats are, in my opinion, a better choice. You'll still need radiation shielding, artificial gravity (via spin), artificial atmosphere, etc., but you'd probably need all those on Mars, too. And space habitats can reasonably be mobile. (If you aren't in a hurry. I envision moving them about using ion rockets, which means 30 lbs of thrust is optimistic. So fast isn't a consideration.)

    To be fair, mars habitats might not require artificial gravity. We don't know how adaptable people are. But you won't be able to get people to regularly use a treadmill over the long term.

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    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday May 12 2019, @08:54PM

      by looorg (578) on Sunday May 12 2019, @08:54PM (#842748)

      ... You'll still need radiation shielding,

      I was sort of wondering about that. It's a bit weird. On their homepage they show two structures "the bunker" and "the beacon", this tall structure is the beacon -- it's obviously the focus piece. At first I thought that the first floor or two was about to be covered or that the bunker was somehow submerged but then in their 3D-renderings (and the layout) they have doors on the bottom floor and an access hatch to the vehicle so they can't really be. Which naturally makes one wonder since the walls don't appear to be that thick, even tho there are no scales or measurements so who really knows.

      If one looks at the TERA images (basically the same house but on earth) it still looks very short, if you are getting four floors in there. Each floor should be 3-3.5m in height so that thing should be at least 12m tall minimum height, probably more up towards 15m tall. So is it going to be a home for dwarfs or a playhouse for children? Or is that thing just one giant building code violation. Or are the whole scaling between background/people/building are just horribly off.

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:03PM (2 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:03PM (#842720)

    Well, Mars has 15x the partial pressure of CO2 as Earth - so there's plenty for plants to breath, though you'd need to pressurize it a bit to keep the water from boiling out of their cells.

    You would need about 10-20x the atmospheric pressure to avoid that problem and be able to walk around without a pressure suit, assuming you had a breather supplying higher-pressure, oxygenated air. That's likely feasible in the (very) long term, assuming we want to dedicate that kind of resources to terraforming a planet - vaporizing the ice caps, supplementing that with icy asteroid bombardment, and seeding the surface with a GMO "primordial slime" to free the copious amounts of oxygen locked into the surface as iron oxides (the reason the planet is red)

    Not a short term plan, that though. More important to early colonization is that as harsh as it is, it's still the lushest place available to start learning to colonize space and give our species new frontiers to expand into. You've got nigh-unlimited CO2 delivered to your doorstep in almost-pure form - all you need to do is pressurize it and feed it into greenhouses to convert it to biomass and oxygen, at least once you consider the massive amounts of water readily available in icecaps and glaciers, and apparently in common subsurface liquid deposits, though you'd likely need to do some serious filtering or distilling to remove the toxic salts.

    The moon doesn't have that - we've got a few potential ice deposits, enough to get things started, but unless we can find other sources we'll need to import much more in order to grow to something remotely city-sized. It doesn't even seem to have appreciable hydrogen deposits to synthesize water from - though it has plenty of oxygen in the form of silicon dioxide (sand). To use local materials to build a growing ecology there would be a much greater challenge, and it's not actually dramatically cheaper to send raw materials to the moon than to Mars. On the other hand, the moon has much to offer Earth in terms of convenient orbital construction materials to justify the cost of building the colony. It's also far less likely to be harboring life whose telltale signs would be obscured as Earth microbes colonize the subsurface.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:33PM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:33PM (#842778) Homepage
      > assuming we want to dedicate that kind of resources to terraforming a planet

      Feel free to assume that. I feel free to assume the contrary.
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      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday May 13 2019, @12:56AM

        by Immerman (3985) on Monday May 13 2019, @12:56AM (#842807)

        Eventually, if we colonize space, terraforming will be dirt cheap. What does it take, really? Engineering a few microbes to make a "primordial slime" that would thrive in the Martian subsurface while producing greenhouse gasses from the rock will almost certainly be well within reach within a century or two. That might be enough all by itself. If not, redirecting a few asteroids? Putting a few thousand square miles of ultrathin mylar mirrors in orbit? Child's play for a civilization building large habitats in space, and not actually terribly expensive - just re-purposing commodity technology widely used for other purposes.

        Now, we may abandon space altogether, in which case sure, it won't happen. But if we become a truly spacefaring species, terraforming Mars will be all but inevitable. I don't expect to see any real progress in my lifetime though.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:23PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:23PM (#842726) Journal

    Emulate Gaaark... great idea.

    With dark matter, you would be going against the consensus opinion of many physicists, but at least there are good reasons to doubt it. "We're never going to live on mars" just isn't true for some values of "we" and "live", unless we have a nice thermonuclear doomsday soon.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:31PM (3 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:31PM (#842777) Homepage
      I have no problem clinging to a view that might eventually be proved wrong, as long as it retains potential truthiness for the entirity of my existence on this planet. And I'm up for making bets about that.
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