Astronauts on the ISS are fabricating objects that can't be made on Earth

[thewayne]

This is different from 3D printing. They're taking a a silicone skin - akin to a balloon - in the shape of the object to be fabricated. It's filled with resin, then exposed to UV light to make it harden. Remove the silicone skin, and you have your part.

The issue is that there are things that cannot be made on Earth because of gravity. An example given is a long steel beam because it will sag under gravity due to its weight. Build it in space and no sag, not that we have that technology now. The astronauts are building several objects in a device described as the size of a PC tower. The test objects will be returned to Earth and studied to see how well the process worked. Later experiments will probably include testing different types of resins, and even fabricating in the vacuum of space.

Interesting stuff!

https://www.popsci.com/science/iss-resin-manufacture-new-shapes/

Even though it's not 3D printing, I'm using that tag for this post as it is 3D fabricating, just not printing.

Comments

[kaishin108]

That sounds pretty crazy!

I hope you post about that balloon from China that they just shot down. :-o

[mtbc]

I've wondered to what extent it was just a floating-with-the-wind balloon versus being somewhat guided, airship-like.

[thewayne]

The one shot down the prev weekend off the coast of North Carolina(?) was steerable.  It was tracked changing altitude, course, and loitering.  The shoot-downs over Alaska and Northern Canada, on Friday and Saturday respectively, behaved more like true balloons.  The military and FBI have recovered enough wreckage from the NC site to determine that it was indeed an intelligence-gathering balloon.

[kaishin108]

How creepy! And now they are seeing so many, weird.

[thewayne]

I think part of them seeing so many is due to two things.  The military has recalibrated some radar systems to look for slow-moving objects like balloons in addition to high-speed objects like planes and missiles.  The other is that it wouldn't surprise me if China is punking us and throwing more balloons at us, which we're shooting down with $10,000,000 missiles.

[disneydream06]

I bet there isn't 3 day free shipping from the ISS though.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Hell, I can't get three-day turnaround from Amazon to my home!

[disneydream06]

Barnes & Noble is getting better, but my 3 days was usually closer to 6. UGH!!!!!!!!!

[thewayne]

At least you don't live in the sticks. :-)

[disneydream06]

It would probably be 12 days then. :o

And now they are changing their program and of course charging more for it.
Currently their program is $25 per year, and from what I heard in the store the other day, they are going to be charging $40 per year now.
Very interesting that they have not sent out a word yet to costumers even though the change is suppose to happen quite soon. Unless they had some good stuff to the program, I may just drop it. :o

[mtbc]

I guess it's at least a start toward the orbital shipyards for our space fleet.

[thewayne]

Ships made of polymer resins.  Amusing!  Personally, I expect more manufacturing on the Moon, plus they can mine some resources there.

[mtbc]

Heh, thus starting our journey toward mining everything useful out of everything in the galaxy and leaving it all a dirty mess!

[thewayne]

I can't say I'm fond of it, if they can figure out how to pull asteroids then those would be better resources.  The mass cost to lift out of Earth's gravity well is just too high for building large space ships, IMO.  More mass requires more fuel for lift, which adds to mass, which requires more fuel... rinse, repeat.  And with water being effectively uncompressible, they have to find a way to get resources from orbit.

[silveradept]

An interesting thought, and I wonder how it will go for them and whether they can scale it up sufficiently to have the resin sent up in quantity.

[thewayne]

There was nothing mentioned as to the 'bake time', I think that will be a big factor on how easily it scales to very very large objects.

[silveradept]

Last I checked in on fabrication, the resin methods still needed hours for relatively small objects. What might be interesting is if the resin has a fixed time, regardless of the size of the object, so long as there's enough UV to do the thing.