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NASA 3D printed Mars habitat concepts


tater

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33 minutes ago, DNKKING said:

What Contest ?

The first post has a link at the start. NASA has been running a contest for teams (mostly universities) to design, and at this phase execute (at 1/3 scale today) 3D printed Mars habitats. They use various print stock, usually mixed with regolith (simulant for testing) that will be acquired at the build site.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/centennial_challenges/3DPHab/five-teams-win-a-share-of-100000-in-virtual-modeling-stage/

That was last year, this is now past virtual modeling, and they are actually printing scale models.

Edited by tater
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  • 8 months later...
Spoiler

 

12 hours ago, Dale Christopher said:

These things look like ant hills and wasp nests.

 

Yes, it's a natural Martian habitat.

Wasps are a good idea. Like the bees, they make multi-cell hives, but from cellulose or so, rather than from wax.
And as the cells share their walls, so only very outer walls of the hive should be enforced.

So, they should build stadium-sized printable domes like in the thread videos, enforced with fungi like shown below, then fill them with the cellulose hive made by specially trained wasps from cellulose produced by algae in a pool.
Make the Mars green again.

 

Edited by kerbiloid
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3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Yes, it's a natural Martian habitat.

Wasps are a good idea. Like the bees, they make multi-cell hives, but from cellulose or so, rather than from wax.
And as the cells share their walls, so only very outer walls of the hive should be enforced.

So, they should build stadium-sized printable domes like in the thread videos, enforced with fungi like shown below, then fill them with the cellulose hive made by specially trained wasps from cellulose produced by algae in a pool.
Make the Mars green again.

 

or we could just build normal domes using normal engineering >_<

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49 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

or we could just build normal domes using normal engineering >_<

Then they need the engineering equipment and metallurgy.

Also it would leave carbon footprint.

Edited by kerbiloid
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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Then they need the engineering equipment and metallurgy.

Also it would leave carbon footprint.

hav you forgotten the lessons of biosphere2 @_@? cement has a carbon footprint toooooooooooooooo

lets just bring prefab flatpacks and cover them in sandbags as needed :confused:

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3 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

lets just bring prefab flatpacks and cover them in sandbags as needed

That's my vision, too. But for capital buildings they need moar materials. So, they want to make cement huts.

Imho, they will anyway need pressurized metal cylinders inside. The concrete is porous, one crack - and the air is outside.

Edited by kerbiloid
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The digging drums they put on that Voltron unicycle device look crazy to me.  So we spin our payload over an over just so we don't need another truck?  Spin one direction to pick stuff up and the stuff in there won't fall out...?  Really?  Doesn't stuff bounce around.  Seems very likely they will crush and scoop a large volume of material, waste most of it, and come home 10% full.  

 

909115d46da65290756cd7dc2767377df280d97b

 

These things have to be huge.  They need so much torque to drive the wheel so it doesn't jam up on every boulder.  

The real advantage is the continuous stream of payload on a conveyor.  Which can be more economical than a fleet of trucks and loaders jostling back and forth.

 

If the goal is to move loose ground from point A to point B.  A scraper is better.  maxresdefault.jpg

 

 

 

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On 1/19/2020 at 1:32 AM, Dale Christopher said:

hav you forgotten the lessons of biosphere2 @_@? cement has a carbon footprint toooooooooooooooo

lets just bring prefab flatpacks and cover them in sandbags as needed :confused:

1024px-16_21_2006_monument_valley.jpg

 

Save on bags.  Save on concrete.  Definitely save miniturized lava smelters.  

Mars has clay

 

 

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On 1/19/2020 at 1:18 AM, kerbiloid said:

Then they need the engineering equipment and metallurgy.

Also it would leave carbon footprint.

I don't think putting CO2 in mars's atmosphere would matter and it might actually help with future terraforming efforts.

Edited by Dirkidirk
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1 hour ago, farmerben said:

Save on bags.  Save on concrete.  Definitely save miniturized lava smelters.  

That's true, but the bags have significant advantages.
1. To lift them to the roof, you don't need an excavator, only a portable crane on top of your landing base.
2. You can attach the bags in chains and hang them around the lander walls. If it's high (say, 20 m), it would require a lot of ground to make a wall, and a very high excavator.
With bags you need only bags, shovels (or a small excavator), and a portable crane.

Spoiler

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSfBk1Tn_zDt7N4JNSVOru


Though anyway I believe, the first thing you need on Mars is this:

Spoiler

 

Make dugouts for you modules, cover them with metal or plastic carcass and sheets, and pour the ground on top. Then put curtains at the entrance.
So, all technics and pioneer modules will be semi-hidden in ground, covered by ground on top, and protected from dust, radiation, UV, and partially from temperature.

Also with this thing fill the bags with ground, make bag sausages and hang them around your large lander walls. Other bags put on its roof.

And look, how much faster would the geological experiments go with it.

Edited by kerbiloid
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Bags of regolith is very likely a first solution to radiation protection, and has been thought so for a while.

 

That said, this thread is specifically about robotic production of habitats using various additive manufacturing concepts.

Certainly bagged soil could be used in a way to provide a kind of structure for rad protection. Small excavator scoops regolith and continuously fills a bag that a robot device coils around a prefab habitat. This is a kind of "3d printing" where the new layer doesn't actually adhere to the previous one, it stays in place due to gravity alone.

 

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I'm gonna drive around Mars in anything, pulling a spike tooth harrow and some rare earth magnets.  Every hour I'll collect several kilos of ferrous-ferric oxide.  Pulverize it into nanoparticles.  Make a ferro-fluid with a solvent like methanol and some epoxy. 

Put a strong magnet inside a dome and make this on the outside

 

1024px-Ferrofluid_in_magnetic_field.jpg

 

Possibly the hardener is Martian CO2, or maybe the evaporation of methanol results in hardening.

 

 

 

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