DO YOU NEED SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS IN SPACE?:
3D Printing in Space Could Lead to Safer Space Missions (Monica Cull, Jan 13, 2025, Discover)
With a working microgravity 3D printer, the research team hopes that it can be used on space missions to create equipment that would otherwise have had to be loaded onto the spacecraft, taking up valuable room and adding extra weight. The added equipment may lead to an unsafe flight or become damaged during takeoff.
“Currently, everything that goes into Earth’s orbit is built on the surface and sent into space on rockets,” said Baliet in a press release. “They have tightly limited mass and volumes and can shake themselves to pieces during launch when mechanical constraints are breached, destroying expensive cargo in the process.”
“If, instead, we could place fabricators in space to build structures on demand, we would be freed from those payload restrictions. In turn, that could pave the way to creating much more ambitious, less resource-intensive projects, with systems actually optimized for their mission and not for the constraints of rocket launches,” said Baliet.