I spent a few hours the other day looking up information about 3D printing after class, and found some pretty cool applications for 3D printing. Everything from children’s toys to prosthetic body parts can be built from these extraordinary little machines. However, the most fascinating, and useful, application of 3D printers would certainly be their ability to repair things in places where spare parts cannot be easily brought. One such example would be outer space, and there have been tests that prove 3D printing is possible in 0 gravity environments.

“You don’t have UPS or DHL up there; you have to wait for the next Russian space ship to bring something that you need,” says Gonzalo Martinez, director of strategic research at Autodesk. Autodesk is a company that is very large in the 3D creation software currently. His point is extremely valid. When something breaks in outer space, all you can do is hope it isn’t vital and wait for a rocket to bring you another. With a 3D printer on board, nearly anything hardware related that breaks can just be printed in a matters of hours, depending on size, and fixed on the spot by crew member on board! The ability to print any nearly any part you need free of human error will be a huge step forward space travel. The implications of this are even greater when considering that a program could 100% create the part, so if another program could install the part, the ship could keep itself going and reach places farther than we have ever reached before.

However, this doesn’t just apply to space ships. Anywhere anyone is travelling that is hard to reach, such as giant exploration teams in Antarctica, 3D printers  will bring a whole new level of survivability to.

“Makerbot and a Part that was created using it.”

Finally, as the last source indicates, these machines aren’t millions of dollars to create. They are  in the price range to be utilized by these expeditions to space or the North Pole or even classrooms, for further development. This is very exciting technology that has the opportunity to explode into the world of design. As the senior wisely noted last class when he was showing us the printers, “A few decades ago, a paper printer was a rare object to have in your house. Now it’s almost standard. This could be the 3D printer in a few years.”

Sources:

http://www.madeinspace.us/3d-printers-tested-in-zero-gravity
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/3d-printing-coming-to-the-manufacturing-spaceand-outer-space-01092012.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394724,00.asp
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?175,96360,96499