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posted by martyb on Friday July 10 2020, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the they're-cracked! dept.

The 3D Printed Homes of the Future Are Giant Eggs on Mars:

It doesn’t get much more futuristic than living on Mars—and guess what? There’s a 3D printed home for that, too. In fact, there are a few; last year saw the conclusion of a contest held by NASA called the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge.

[...] The top prize ($500,000) went to AI Space Factory, a New York-based architecture and construction technologies company focused on building for space exploration. Their dual-shell, four-level design is called Marsha, and unlike Martian habitats we’ve seen on the big screen or read about in sci-fi novels, it’s neither a dome nor an underground bunker. In fact, it sits fully above ground and it looks like a cross between a hive and a giant egg.

The team chose the hive-egg shape very deliberately, saying that it’s not only optimized to handle the pressure and temperature demands of the Martian atmosphere, but building it with a 3D printer will be easier because the printer won’t have to move around as much as it would to build a structure with a larger footprint. That means less risk of errors and a faster building speed.

The building material would combine basalt fiber and bioplastics made from plants grown on Mars.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:46PM (#1019186)

    Batteries are definitely off the table for Mars until it gets local production - they're too heavy to transport in useful amounts. Waste processing could yield gases that may be useful as fuel, or they could be refined biofuels from algae, or maybe a GMO yeast or fungus.