On the approach to Made in Space’s NASA Research Park facility in California, there’s a structure so large it almost appears like an optical illusion. My brain couldn’t compute the vastness of these arched steel girders riveted together to leave what looks like the husk of a crash-landed spacecraft from an apocalyptic B-movie.
“What is that thing?”
I ask Made in Space’s Co-founder and Director, Jason Dunn.
“That is our inspiration!”
You probably know Made in Space (MIS) from a famous photograph of astronaut Barry “Butch” E. Wilmore holding a ratchet that he’d just printed onboard the International Space Station (ISS). The STL file was sent from earth and printed on Made in Space’s Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF). The AMF is a plastic extrusion printer similar to fused deposition modelling, adapted to survive forces of launch, integrate with ISS’s technological eco-system and operate consistently on orbit for at least the rest of the life cycle of the ISS.
The AMF is a feat of engineering excellence, tested to the nth degree, there are now two onboard the ISS, and they have printed over 200 objects including spare parts, upgrades and tools. MIS’s research suggests that over a third of all the broken things onboard the ISS were plastic and potentially fixable with the current AMF system. The next step for onboard manufacturing is MIS’s Vulcan technology, a hybrid 3D printer and machine tool that prints near net shapes and finishes both metal and polymer parts to precise, fully operational parts. Vulcan recently was given the green light with NASA funding to head into Phase II to ready the system for demonstration onboard the ISS.
As impressive as those printers are, one would have to question the sustainability of any company who manufacture a few machines for one very distant customer, the answer to that question of the company’s validity is in the name. “When we set out to build a company it was set out on the big vision,” says Jason Dunn. “If we wanted just to build a 3D printer for the space station the company would be called, ‘3D Printers on the Space Station,’ not, ‘Made in Space.’”
Butch E Wilmore with the wrench printed in polymer onboard the ISS.
The 50 strong staff at MIS only need to glance out of the office window to see what is motivating the company today. The aforementioned gargantuan beast on the horizon turns out to be Hangar One, one of the largest unsupported human-made structures on earth, built in the 1930s to house the USS Macon - the largest helium-filled airship ever to take to the skies. The exterior panels were removed in 2012 and what’s left of the Google-owned premises, which could accommodate six football fields, is the just the network of steel girders. MIS is progressing towards manufacturing structures of Hangar One’s size in space.
Jason and the Archinaut
The technology that will power this is called Extended Structure Additive Manufacturing (ESAM) and has proven to work after passing NASA’s thermal vacuum test in 2017. Earlier this year MIS set an officially ratified Guinness World Record for the “World’s Longest 3D Printed Non assembled Piece” - a black polymer beam printed at MIS’s HQ and which, when showing to TCT, Jason quipped, “we only stopped because we didn’t have any more room.”
“It’s 37.7 metres long, and the reason that is important is that everything we put in space today is put inside of a rocket, you can’t put an object like this inside of a rocket, but we need things bigger than that in space. In fact, 40 metres is about the length of one of the solar arrays [the wings] on the space station. The solar array wings had a mechanism that packed up small and then popped open; the wings are pretty close to being the biggest we can pack up as a deployable and pop open in space, we want bigger.”
Made in Space's record breaking beam printed as one using the basis of Archinaut technology, ESAM.
ESAM is what powers the MIS, NASA $20m funded product, Archinaut. Archinaut will primarily be a spacecraft with robotic arms and ESAM. Jason describes ESAM’s functionality as being like a “robot spider building a web,” using its robotic arms to traverse along the structures assembling what comes out of ESAM. The raw material is launched to the free-fl ying robots, and a design is beamed from earth, Archinaut manufactures and then assembles the structure in orbit.
We’ve seen novel 3D printing solutions fall at the applications hurdle, but Jason believes that Archinaut already has a crucial, achievable application for the progress of satellite technology.
“Every satellite in space has in some way an aperture,” says Jason. “In the game of apertures, bigger is better. Today we’re stuck, apertures and antennas can only be a certain diameter to fi t into rockets. If you can get into hundreds of metres across in apertures size, you could do amazing things like have broadband speeds directly to your cell phone.”
We’ve seen the costs of $10,000 a kilo to launch anything quoted numerous times, so launching a manufacturing facility to space to manufacture in space makes sense. However, another of MIS’s advanced projects wants to flip that dynamic on its head. Instead of manufacturing on earth to launch to space, its Optical Fiber Production in Microgravity Experiment (OFPIM) is going to manufacture high-value optical fibre in space for use on earth.
“The internet is connected around the world under oceans; the stock market, New York to London trading, all that is built on optical fibre,” says Jason. “The fibre is a piece of glass that has been heated up and pulled into something thinner than your hair that is kilometres long. Glass is a crystal so when it sets up in gravity there are defects in the crystal itself but if you make the glass in zero gravity it is almost like one big perfect crystal, there are no lattice defects, which means you can send light from one end to the other with lower attenuation.”
Made in Space's Archinaut: Ulisses concept
The amorphous properties of these fibre-optics mean less of the bulky, inefficient repeater stations dotted across the ocean floor. MIS conservatively estimates that 10 km of the fi bre-optics known as ZBLAN could be spooled onto a roll weighing just 1 kg, SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule as a return payload mass of 3,000 kilograms, meaning one fully loaded return trip could almost supply enough to go around the earth.
“There are some fascinating use cases where space becomes the place we manufacture,” explains Jason. “Today, low-earth orbit is a place where we have a space station that governments operate and there are some [privately owned] satellites. I think what we’re going to see is a lot more industrial activities happen in space. There will be many space stations owned by diff erent companies and organisations doing a variety of industrial manufacturing activities. We won’t have polluted skylines in future because we will make things in an environmentally friendly way in space.”
It's not rocket science
In May 2018, NASA successfully fire-tested its most advanced 3D printed rocket engine part. The agency printed the first, full-scale 3D printed copper combustion chamber liner in 2015 at its Marshall flight centre using a powdered copper alloy created by material scientists at its Glenn Research Center. The liner was then sent to Langley where NASA’s proprietary E-Beam Free Form Fabrication Technology - a layer-additive process that uses an electron beam and wire to fabricate metallic structures - was used to deposit a nickel-alloy onto the liner to form the chamber jacket. The part, which is lighter and quicker to manufacture, stood up to the forces and survived tests of 100% power.
Relativity's Stargate 3D printer and a fuel drum additively manufactured in three days.
Relativitiy, like Made in Space, is an ambitious young California-based company with NASA backing. Co-Founders Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone came out of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX projects respectively. Relativity’s aim is to entirely additively manufacturing rockets. The company has a 20-year research grant from NASA and has test-fired its AEON rocket over 100 times. Relativity claims that its Stargate 3D printer is the largest metal 3D printer in the world and can build a flight-ready rocket in less than 60 days.
Another California start-up, RocketLab, which has successfully launched four satellites into orbit over the past year, says its battery-powered Rutherford rocket engine could be 3D printed in just three days.
As evidenced, 3D printing is revolutionising the manufacture of the rockets to send cargo into space, but Made in Space thinks that there’s only so much optimisation achievable in additively manufacturing a rocket and thus the question of, ‘how can we improve rockets?’ is the wrong questions to pose.
“When you look at a picture of a rocket launching off into space - the skyscraper of structure with a flame coming out of the bottom - 99% is the rocket,” explains Jason. “Out of that 99%, 97% is fuel, so there’s 2% structure, and the final 1% is the payload. There are all these genius ideas on how we make the rocket cheaper, reusable, bigger, smaller but the physics will always be the same. If you want to increase the amount of payload mass that you send into space you can’t take away the 97% that is fuel, that is just physics. All you can do try to take your 2 of structure and make it slightly better, you could imagine maybe a 2% payload and 1% structure but then how do you ever get below that?
“We looked at what everybody else was doing and said, ‘everybody is trying to make a better rocket, what if we ask a different question?’ And the question is, ‘what if we didn’t need a rocket at all?’ When you explore that question, you open a new world of possibilities like having antennas as big as a football stadium, or sending robots to Mars to build habitats way before we send humans, or making things in space not possible on earth.
“I truly believe that that the success of Made in Space is because we ask different questions.”
