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.
Related Stories
NASA wants to use 3D printing technology to build deep space habitats onsite instead of bringing the materials with them. Towards that end they have announced the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, in partnership with America Makes, as part of the ongoing Centennial Challenge program.
NASA has announced three winners who will share the $100,000 prize in its competition to make virtual Martian habitats.
The 11 participating groups were tasked with making a full-scale habitat using modeling software, building on an earlier stage of the competition that required partial virtual modeling.
The teams were graded on their layout, programming, use of interior space, and their habitat's ability to be scaled to full size for construction, according to a NASA statement announcing the winners. The groups also received points for their aesthetic representation and realism.
The three winning teams were
SEArch+/Apis Cor - New York - $33,954.11
Zopherus – Rogers, Arkansas - $33,422.01
Mars Incubator – New Haven, Connecticut - $32,623.88
This is the third stage in NASA's 3D Printed Habitat Challenge.
The final stage of the competition will be open to the public in Peoria, Illinois and will be held May 1-4 of this year. It will consist of a head-to-head reduced scale print of the structures. The prize in the last stage of the competition is $800,000.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:46AM (16 children)
Nothing wrong with tall - four stories seems alright. But, how about tall and fat? That "beacon" design just looks to me like an invitation for the wind to knock it over. Make the first two floors wider, then stick your "beacon" above them. Even better, make those first two floors more square, so as to be more modular.
Modular, you ask? How about the printer builds a central one, to get things going? Then, another, connected to the first, and so on. That "tiny bubble of earth" is going to feel terribly confining after several months. How about walking next door, to chat with the neighbors? Who wants to suit up, just to go chat with someone, to get your mind off of work for a few minutes? So, after some time passes, you might have an entire village (given enough time, a small town) of buildings all connected at the ground floors. That is all "common area", where people can travel freely. Second floors are more private, ie, you expect to knock on the door to get permission to come in.
I guess I just don't like that winning design very much. There's not a lot of future in individual, isolated structures that can accommodate only four people. Go big, or go home, right?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday May 12 2019, @12:33PM (1 child)
They're arguing everyone else got it wrong:
( https://www.aispacefactory.com/marsha [aispacefactory.com] )
it honestly sounds ridiculous but in the absence of technical data or expert opinion... Regardless, it's possible and even likely NASA awarded them over the vertically telescoping arm rather than the vertical structure design.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:10PM
They're probably right about structural concerns, but seem to overlook one of the most important features of a martian habitat: radiation shielding. You want several meters of rock between you and the sky to get anything like the radiation shielding offered by Earth's atmosphere. Instead they seem to have relatively thin walls, and a frigging skylight as the roof!
Still, the 3D printer hardware seems like it would have a lot of potential. Seems like you should be able to print a large dome surrounding the printer instead of a small one off to one side, with a doorway large enough to drive the retracted printer out of when you're done, and a structure either several meters thick, or capable of supporting the weight of being buried under that much sand.
There's also the minor detail that a larger diameter delivers a greater interior area for a given amount of perimeter. The wall thickness does need to increase linearly with the diameter of a pressure vessel, so the ratio of wall volume to interior volume doesn't actually change - but if you want thick walls for radiation shielding, you might as well put them to work as a pressure vessel as well.
Alternatively, you might have such thin-walled pressure habitats all under a larger "open air" radiation dome - they could even be integrated as support columns. Presumably you'd eventually want to seal and pressurize the large dome as well, but that could be more of a challenge to maintain integrity, and having fall-back options in case of a breach would be invaluable. As would having a "drive in" garage early on where you could work on equipment in a lightweight pressure suit with no radiation shielding needed.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Sunday May 12 2019, @01:27PM (1 child)
>That "beacon" design just looks to me like an invitation for the wind to knock it over.
That's not really a concern on Mars. The density of Martian air is only about 1% of Earth's (0.6% the pressure, * CO2 being 1.67 times the density at the same pressure), while wind pressure is proportional to density * speed^2
Which means, to get the equivalent force of a 60mph wind on Earth, you'd need a Mars wind to be going 600mph.
But the fastest wind recorded on the martian surface is only 60mph, which will have the equivalent force of a 6mph breeze on Earth.
(Score: 2, Funny) by RandomFactor on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:06PM
Don't try to feed us that, we've all seen The Martian. :-p
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:43PM (11 children)
Can "we're never going to live on mars" be my equivalent of Gaaark's dark matter rant?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 12 2019, @03:13PM
"My battery is low and it's getting dark"
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:15PM (1 child)
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.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday May 12 2019, @08:54PM
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)
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.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:23PM (4 children)
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:31PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:43PM (2 children)
No bet. You could shorten your lifespan to win.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:57PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:11PM
I wouldn't want to stress you out.
Mars 2024! B-F-R! B-F-R!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]