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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: 2) by VLM on Friday July 10 2020, @12:48PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @12:48PM (#1019036)

    building it with a 3D printer will be easier because the printer won’t have to move around as much

    I own and have seen uncountable Cartesian coordinate printers, and I've watched delta printers in operation, but I've never seen online or in person a radial printer.

    I suppose a radial design would normally result in instant tangled filament if designed trivially. But someone (at NASA?) might have a bright idea for a radial printer.

    I find the idea of a radial printer interesting. Much as Cartesian printers do a great job printing boxes and not so hot on round stuff, a radial printer SHOULD make nice vases and other egg shaped objects.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @01:57PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @01:57PM (#1019062) Journal

      Other round structures.

      Water tower.

      Fuel tower -- storage for manufactured fuel.

      Short height but round structures such as garage or workshop. Can a roof be printed. I know this is less materials efficient than the taller egg / hive structure for living quarters.

      5G cell tower to help spread covid to Mars.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:24PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:24PM (#1019512)

        Water tower.

        Oooh I've got an interesting idea. Pretty much any civil engineering for water and sewage pipes.

        Yeah current popular filament are probably not drinkable, but something could be engineered.

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday July 10 2020, @03:02PM

      by Freeman (732) on Friday July 10 2020, @03:02PM (#1019095) Journal

      My guess is that a radial design introduces it's own difficulties. Have you seen a radial printer of any sort? Essentially every paper printer I've seen works almost identically, a head moving back and forth along one line. A 3D Printer essentially uses a lot of the same mechanics, but in a 3D environment.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:06PM (#1019042)

    Exhibit1) The book Red Mars had them underground because of radiation.
    Exhibit 2) Musk started Boring Company to easily dig tunnels on Mars.

    • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 10 2020, @06:35PM

      by captain normal (2205) on Friday July 10 2020, @06:35PM (#1019183)

      1961 called, they want Valentine Michael Smith returned to Mars, ASAP.

      --
      When life isn't going right, go left.
  • (Score: 2) by BananaPhone on Friday July 10 2020, @01:43PM

    by BananaPhone (2488) on Friday July 10 2020, @01:43PM (#1019050)

    (Damn I'm old!)

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday July 10 2020, @01:55PM (7 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @01:55PM (#1019060) Journal

    There are good reasons why round is a bad idea for a house, but architects seem to love them. Where to you put the book cases? The closets? The food storage? How do you access them for maintenance? Where to you put the couch? The bed?

    There are answers for each of those questions, but there don't seem to be answers for ALL of those questions.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @02:10PM (3 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @02:10PM (#1019065) Journal

      Which is cheaper or more practical to deliver and build on Mars:
      * material efficient round structure at cost of having to answer the square peg questions
      * square structure that costs more materials and energy to construct but solves interior design issues efficiently

      Book cases probably require books. Book cases can be installed on your mobile phone or tablet.

      Closets likewise can be installed . . . Closets can be against exterior curved wall, making curved closet. The clothes hanging bar can be curved in parallel with exterior wall. Close hangers hangars can slide along curved bar about as easily as they do on a straight bar. Astronauts accustomed to straight bars will get used to it.

      Couches can be curved along an exterior wall. Or TVs can be curved along an exterior wall. Beds can have the head of the bed along exterior wall, with foot of bed pointing toward center of structure. Or beds can be along curved exterior wall with unused space made into small oddball shelves. Similarly book cases or other utility shelves could be along exterior wall, with flat fronts, such that the center part of the shelf is deeper than the outer edges of the shelf.

      Flat structures, or more efficient round structures. Some compromises are going to have to be made in order to build on Mars. At least for the first generations.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday July 10 2020, @08:16PM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @08:16PM (#1019206) Journal

        Not sure I can accept your arguments, but though they're on topic, they don't really address my question.

        That said, I can see rounded external walls as a pressure containment mechanism. But I don't see the problem with getting an extrusion mechanism to print rectangular walls. Even the first large scale extrusion printers could print linear walls. Rounded clothes racks are quite doable, but replacing the rod becomes a whole lot harder. With couches, better to produce a bunch of small pieces that can be fitted together into a roundish couch. As I said, each specific problem is soluble. But solving them all at the same time becomes intractable. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves.

        However, my question was really a lot more general than this specific case. It covers Chicago's World's Fair http://www.chicagomag.com/real-estate/January-2019/Restoring-the-1933-Worlds-Fair-House-of-Tomorrow/, [chicagomag.com] and others. (Not as many as I thought, though, from a quick google.) I've seen a few and they've all been unsatisfactory, from the campus building at UC Berkeley (well, the chemistry lecture hall worked pretty well, but the office building was a real problem), to a couple that people were living in. They're ok if all you want to do is camp out, and I presume the Mongols worked out the problems with their Yurts, but they don't work well if you've got lots of stuff...and that includes things like computers an printers. (Perhaps it would work better with portable computers and WiFi. I've never seen that tried. That's a version of the "cut it in lots of small pieces and fit them in" solution.)

        That said, I've lived for awhile in a Geodesic Dome. A Quonset hut worked better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut [wikipedia.org] And there were environmental reasons for the design of radomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radome [wikipedia.org] But those reasons don't make them good to live in. Basically, when you use rounded living areas, you may be more efficiently enclosing the area, but you need a lot more area (or volume) to compensate for the problems that it causes.

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        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @09:23PM

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @09:23PM (#1019238) Journal

          I'm only thinking about the Mars habitat case. The first ones are going to have to be very sparse. I don't expect multiple couch pieces. Just something practical to sit on.

          On Earth I think round homes are probably a bad idea, generally. Rectangular rooms seem to solve a lot of problems. If other shapes worked generally, we would see more of them. But we don't. Or only in more expensive houses with lots of space to waste.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:30PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:30PM (#1019516)
        Round is fine for inflatable structures. Since Mars air pressure is really low, inflatable stuff might work well enough for buildings. Then the wasted space isn't an issue.

        But it all seems like putting the cart before the horse since there's little science that has been done to prove that Mars gravity is enough for long term survival of humans and our favorite animals.
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 10 2020, @05:14PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 10 2020, @05:14PM (#1019157) Journal

      Rounded dome designs are more impervious to hurricanes, tornadoes, and nuclear explosion shockwaves, all of which will become more common in daily life.

      You can put the rectangular rooms in the underground floors.

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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 10 2020, @08:26PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @08:26PM (#1019209) Journal

        That *might* apply here, but the illustration didn't look as if there were any underground rooms. My question, however, was more general. I can accept that environmental constraints may make a roundish dwelling necessary, but why do architects tend to prefer them even when there is no good reason...and there are lots of reasons why it's a bad idea. (I've seen a curved picture window on the front of a house. That window MUST be custom made. Imagine the cost of replacement if/when it's broken.

        That said, I feel that the reasons against a rounded living area are sufficiently strong that that should be nearly the last choice. But that's not how architects feel.

        I'm also dubious that it would be that much easier to construct, even given extrusion printing. But I could be wrong on that. I know rounded fish bowls are much less likely to leak than rectangular ones. (OTOH, the rectangular ones weren't extrusion printed, so the argument is less than totally convincing. Still, the corners would definitely need to be stronger.)

        One problem is that rounded areas are less efficient to live in, so one ends up requiring more space to do the living. I lived in a Geodesic Dome for awhile, and also in a Quonset hut. The Quonset was a lot more efficient, but the edges of the space were still essentially unusable.

        --
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    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Friday July 10 2020, @11:47PM

      by looorg (578) on Friday July 10 2020, @11:47PM (#1019276)

      You still see the furniture as been squares or boxes. I guess a lot of furniture would be fairly simple, just make them at the same angles as the walls, I'm sure there will be some standards. It should work fine really. There might be some deadspace in the bends and corners but over all it will be fine. Couches and such are probably fine to. Problem might be beds, not sure if people would like to sleep in the shape of a banana. But they might get used to it.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @02:14PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @02:14PM (#1019066) Journal

    Could useful energy be obtained by attaching fascinating solar panels to the correct portions of exterior round structure? The path of the sun is predictable and stable.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday July 10 2020, @02:58PM (1 child)

      by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @02:58PM (#1019092)

      Path of the sun might be predictable and stable, but access to it (i.e. visibility) definitely isn't on Mars. Solar panels will need to be in a maintainable (think cleaning dust off) location and have massive battery backup for weeks-long dust storms. You probably want multiple redundant power (solar + battery) installations some distance from the habitats in case of battery fires - not sure if e.g. LiON will burn in Mars atmosphere, but the batteries do have oxygen in them and you definitely wouldn't want them in (or near) habitat. May be easier and cheaper (read: lighter overall) to ship a nuke battery or reactor out there than the required battery backup. Of course if you can make batteries and panels from Mars materials then go for that.

      • (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.

  • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Friday July 10 2020, @04:15PM

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2020, @04:15PM (#1019131) Journal
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:41PM (#1019184)

    I like how they claim round is good for building them quickly, and then mention they'll be made out of plants grown on site.

    So how long do we have to sit around growing plants before we can build a shelter?

    As a nitpick: aren't all modern plastics plant-based? A million year long prior conversion to oil doesn't change the original source. Hopefully their process isn't that time-intense.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:24AM (1 child)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:24AM (#1019357) Journal

    These are very sexy, but they shit all over the KISS principle. My wager is that the structures brought from Earth will look a lot more like dirt bermed concrete canvas shelters [concretecanvas.com] and a lot less like Eggman's secret base from Sonic the Hedgehog.

    I also don't see a strong argument for these for structures built on Mars from indigenous materials. To do this we need to grow tons of biomass with water supplies we haven't found yet, refine it to plastic, mine basalt, crush it to powder, grade it, mix the plastic and basalt into an extrudable form, and then feed it to a does-not-yet-exist printer to make a building. That feels much more difficult than making a box of blocks of quarried stone and lining it with a gas-tight membrane. The technology for the latter is roughly equivalent to building a water tank, and we have far more experience building stone tanks than we do 3-D printing them.

    I still want to go.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:33AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:33AM (#1019382)

      Berming will be necessary for almost any structure on the surface. Radiation shielding doesn't get more cost-effective or simple than "pile dirt on top". Maintaining temperatures will also be far easier underground than on the surface.

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