The organization has teamed up with a Texas business that 3D prints homes here on Earth.
Humanity hasn’t set foot on the Moon in 50 years, but we’re heading back. The first crewed expedition to the moon is scheduled to land there sometime around 2025 thanks to NASA’s Artemis Program. Yet unlike the previous visit, NASA intends to stay for the long haul, with plans for both surface operations and a space station. The CIA has also made ideas for lunar dwellings public, and it is working with an organization named Icon to make them a reality. Throughout our lifetimes, if everything goes according to plan, people could be residing in lunar settlements.
Project Olympus is the name of the strategy, and results could be seen as early as 2040. The technology that could someday lead to lunar dwellings is already being developed by Icon (that may or may not look like the above concept). It employs 3D printers to build homes on Earth more quickly and sustainably than it would using conventional techniques. This construction method might make the best use of in-situ resource use, as NASA has previously advised (ISRU). This entails making use of local resources rather than hauling everything from elsewhere.
NASA would start by sending a sizable 3D printer to the Moon. On Earth, Icon’s printers have shown their worth, but in space? The majority of spacecraft hardware is built to be radiation and temperature resistant from the ground up. According to The New York Times, NASA will launch the Icon printer into a specialized test chamber at Marshall Space Flight Center early in 2019. The extreme radiation and vacuum that the printer will encounter on the Moon will be present there.
In 2020, NASA and Icon collaborated for the first time to fund research towards printing structures above low-Earth orbit. NASA announced a $60 million contract in 2022 for a technology that may manufacture dwellings and rocket landing pads in space. Project Olympus’ incorporation of civilian dwellings is a fresh twist on NASA’s increasing lunar aspirations.
Icon wants to base its 3D printing on lunar dirt, but it’s not clear how long-lasting such a material would be. There are worries that the building supplies may end up harming the 3D printer and other technology because the dust on the Moon is so abrasive. NASA has funded research so early because of this. NASA predicts that with nearly 20 years to prepare, the bugs can be smoothed out by 2040 or thereabouts.
Before NASA begins constructing the first starter home on the Moon, there will be a number of lunar tests, but those will happen after the Artemis Program picks up. NASA has so far launched Artemis I, an unmanned lunar flyby and the Space Launch System’s initial test. As early as next year, Artemis II will perform a crewed flyby, and Artemis III will thereafter perform the first crewed landing. After that, the organization will need to construct surface landing pads for equipment like 3D printers. The SpaceX Starship, which is currently in construction, might be able to transport the essential supplies to the Moon. Don’t put too much emphasis on the fact that there won’t be any in-situ tests for years.