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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.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:03PM (2 children)
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)
Feel free to assume that. I feel free to assume the contrary.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday May 13 2019, @12:56AM
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.