3D printing offers great potential for construction in space, as printers on the ISS, asteroids, or even the surface of the Moon could rely on materials from the local environment to fabricate structures, limiting the amount of resources that would need be launched from Earth, therefore reducing the valuable payload space and weight of outgoing spacecraft. Exactly how those printers would work, however, is still being sorted out. On September 10th, NASA and America Makes announced 30 finalists for its 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, hoping to sift through the most viable proposals for 3D printing a habitat on Mars to award the winner with grants to take their project to the next level. …
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