How We Email Hardware to Space
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If so, can you share the name of the 3D printer you have chosen and if possible on what grounds (advantages - disadvantages)
For reliability, I must recommend the Solidoodle 3 -- mine kept operating through BEING ON FIRE when I was testing the laser cutter attachment.
What's the process for making the custom finger splints? Do you use a point cloud device like a Leap Motion to model the finger?
There's a SCAD script for the finger splints and we've been taking the measurements with a medical caliper. This crew is half medical doctors :) I'm just here to do the engineering and some drone/rover piloting. We're also designing a way to take air pictures from Mars where drones won't work.
That said, this is awesome. I just think that there are pros and cons to both and we shouldn't be focused only on 3D printing.
Remelting waste is possible, but this sort of high quality manufacturing is really hard, even on earth with gravity to keep material in a mold and hardly any mass or energy constraints. This, and the chip collection system add additional mass, have to be developed way before being put into orbit, and have to work extremely reliably. Even a tiny amount of swarf floating around the interior of a spacecraft could be disastrous.
We aren't focusing only on 3d printing, we're focusing first on 3d printing, because it can work today, with technology we have, on a low mass budget, and without jeopardizing the primary objectives of whatever mission includes it.
In a spacecraft, this is obviously even more critical that one be able to make repair parts on the spot. The Apollo 13 crew was pretty lucky they were able to make makeshift repairs to keep going without much of anything to work with. One shouldn't rely on being so lucky again.
The Challenger disaster (discussed recently on HN) comes to mind. If the crew knew about the damaged wing, and had some ability to make new parts on board, they might have been able to rig a repair good enough to get them home.
A minor correction: I think you meant Columbia. Challenger was destroyed by a leaking seal in the solid rocket booster while still in the launch phase. Not something fixable while in flight.
Seems like using this manufacturing approach would be a very tough sell for any real mission.
Only benefit of 3D printing at your destination is the ability to manufacture something that was overlooked, so contingency planning. (yea, yea, someday we'll mine the printable materials on site, right...)
For just about any other item that you know you need, it would be much more weight-effective (the golden measure in launch considerations) to just build the part here on earth, where you can maximize specific density and specific strength using materials that 3D printing can't touch. Plus you aren't lugging around a heavy 3D printer + raw materials.
Long term, I think the goal would be to do metal printing in addition to plastic printing (most likely with separate machines).
3D printed plastic parts can do a lot - they aren't as weak as people make them out to be.
The obvious advantages are that complex things can be made on site with zero labor required (besides occasional assembly of things that can't be printed assembled).
It can be hard to speculate on what a general purpose tool will be most used for in the future, but I do think that there is something on-site printing offers that delivery from earth does not. As we send spacecraft beyond low earth orbit, sending from earth simply stops being an option.
Hell, from what I recall of the movie a 3D printer onboard Apollo 13 could have salvaged the mission entirely. 3D printing isn't just about making things you forgot, but replacing things or making new things. Maybe people get to mars and realize there is an experiment they want to run that needs some little assembly they could print.
I'm not able to predict what a 3D printer would be used for, but you can be damn sure I'd want the ability to fabricate parts locally if I was on a multi-year Mars mission. And that does seem to be our long term goal.
* assuming theres also a filament extruder package (more initial weight i know), you can recycle the printing material some number of times, meaning that you can just not ship a bunch of custom things with each subsequent experiment package.
* Materials can be better packed. Weight is an issue, but so is volume. A roll of filament can produce a bunch of parts that no longer need to be designed and manufactured to withstand "unfolding" stresses - you can just make the awkward shape in situ.
* Related to the previous point - some things can be manufactured with much less material - they never need to handle 1g environments, let alone the vibrations and higher g parts of launch. This means less material in a lot of situations.
* I presume (if there isn't now) there will be "rough" launches to carry bulk materials, and "gentle" launches for delicate things and people. If there is a way to do "rough launches" cheaper, (higher g, higher vibration, more risk since there aren't humans or super expensive equipment on board) then you can provide more space on the "gentle" launches for the the delicate equipment. Further - with more space on "gentle launches" you get a better iteration time, you don't have to schedule space/weight for your 3d-printable parts as tightly.
Basically - 3d printing in orbit provides a nice way to separate several logistical concerns, easing some of the expense and engineering needed per experiment in space.
Here's my reasoning: backups / spares
There are an enormous number of backup parts on the ISS – there needs to be for any manned space vehicle – to fix systems that fail. Instead of wasting weight, fuel & money on lifting multiple spares to the ISS, one could 3D print them on demand. Not all spares will be needed simultaneously.
Every year, that meme is becoming closer to reality. You can already download small plastic objects. And I look forward to the day when I can torrent a pirated Tesla to my garage :p
Imagine what the film Apollo 13 would have looked like with a fast 3D printer on board. Instead of trying to shoehorn a square CO2 scrubber into a round hole using all sorts of stuff that was never designed for the job, Houston could have sent them a perfectly designed adapter.
Yeah, they would run out of battery juice way before reentry burn :-)
As an engineer my first thought when I saw what it printed was how do you turn a bolt with a plastic wrench without breaking the wrench?
Is it possible to UV-harden the plastic maybe to give it a harder surface?
I think it's just amazing that we're at this point anyways. Regardless of how good the tools are, we can print them in space.
We pay a tech who knows CAD and a fab house rather than a machine shop. A machine shop would probably cost a lot more. Although now that we have the design down pat, we wouldn't waste as much money on prototypes.
Our design includes 2" diameter threaded ends and it holds pretty firmly although the threads do wear out and tear off the tube with vibration and heat changes.
3D printing let us try and tune successive iterations for best performance far more rapidly than we could have done with classical subtractive machining. OTOH, our 3D printers care about the room temperature and HVAC breeze, whereas a lathe or mill wouldn't notice. Tradeoffs....
It would be nothing to throw some speech recognition into the loop - not that you need to - and basically say "I want a 16mm wrench" or "I want a 16 oz cup" and come back in 1 hour to find it exists.