3D printing homes for Mars

A team competing in NASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge worked with Techmer PM to develop materials that could one day be used to house human visitors to Mars.

Teams of citizen inventors are participating in the competition to innovate technology to support deep space exploration and also advance Earth-based construction capabilities. A partnership between freeform 3D printing startup Branch Technology and architecture firm Foster + Partners, collaborating with Techmer, won third place in the most recent level, which involved 3D printing a structural beam using plastics and simulated Martian soil.

The team also took first place in the previous level, creating a truncated cone and cylinder from the material they developed. Next, they will be tasked with printing a dome structure for mechanical testing.

The idea is to enable customizable habitat options using locally available materials and potentially recycled plastics.

"If you think of a place like Mars — but also it could be remote places on this planet — if you try to build a structure, you'd have to send all these tools and materials and so on," said John Manuck, Techmer's CEO. "But if you could 3D print the structure, of course the 3D printer, you'd have to send that there, and some of the raw material, but then it can produce a whole range of products."

Techmer helped the team develop a material that could be processed using Branch Technology's 3D printing system. The material was formulated with the idea that a potential source of plastics on Mars could be recycled shipping crates or other packaging materials used to transport supplies through space.

"Recyclable plastics were used in the top three scoring teams, indicating that a thermoplastic concrete material may be viable for 3D printing habitats on Mars," said NASA's Rob Meuller, a subject matter expert for the competition, in a statement. "Thermoplastics ... could be obtained from discarded packaging material or even created on Mars using the carbon dioxide atmosphere and hydrogen from water found in the soil. Such concrete materials could also have applications on Earth while using discarded plastic trash."

And though the ability to live on Mars is many years away, the technology advancements developed through the competition could find applications on Earth.

"It's not like we're going to get rich overnight on this; it's not some mass-produced product," Manuck said. "But you know the whole space program has been really a way where new technologies are applied, which then find all kinds of use in our everyday life. ... It opens up a lot of design opportunities that are being demonstrated in this Mars habitat project."