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These days, engineering for space has a lot to do with packaging. Your biggest, most ambitious ideas have to be deliverable in small chunks that tin can be reassembled later, or blow up similar a airship, or even fold up like an origami crane. Everything you want to do in infinite, your super-telescopes and Mars colony ships, has to fit into the tip of a rocket, either in one case or over and over. To movement infinite tech forward, you've got to design technology for zero gravity, merely build it in single gravity — information technology's abrasive! But what if y'all could get effectually that trouble by edifice tech in the same environment in which information technology's designed to operate?

The idea of doing construction in space has existed for a long time, but like many long-lived ideas about What NASA Ought To Exercise, it's always been far easier written than realized. Now, scientists are making increasingly serious propositions for increasingly detailed mission profiles, all aimed at giving mankind its first infinite-based shipyard. An incredibly detailed such mission was recently proposed in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, going through all the steps in edifice and assembling a modular 100-meter space telescope called the Robotically Assembled Modular Infinite Telescope, or RAMST.

Hubble vs. James Webb Space Telescope, primary mirror size

Hubble vs. James Webb Space Telescope, primary mirror size. The enormous Webb mirror had to exist launched in a folded class then expanded.

The advantages of constructing space technology in infinite are obvious — if something is just always going to take to office in zero gravity, building it there means it tin can be far more than delicate than a machine that has to exist able to support its own weight downwards on the surface. In space, you tin build objects that are bigger and more than convoluted without fear of internal collapse due to lack of significant tensile strength.

For the near part, building in space could realize the machines many astrophysicists have been imagining since they were children, and which your graduate education in physics told you would always be impossible. As long equally there's been a space program, there's been a will to create a space construction program — the just question has been how to actually get information technology washed.

The almost obvious answer was to just do structure in infinite. Get some astronauts, put them in space, give them building tools, and have them build things. The get-go problem with this is that space suits don't lend themselves to physical labor, or precision piece of work, or long-term employ in general. You might go rid of some headaches in designing your next satellite, but those reduced costs and delays will probable be more than offset by the increased coiffure, food, equipment, and oxygen requirements, not to mention the increased chance of injury and crisis.

space construction 2

Concepts for the robotically assembled space telescope.

Designing a solution is no modest feat. How practise you build in orbit, where the near-nix pressure, absenteeism of flammable gasses, and lack of an objective "down" all throw a wrench into the structure technologies we've developed over the past few yard years? More to the point, how do y'all practise it when human labor can't even exist used every bit part of the solution? Virtually whatever poured, hardening material won't work right off the bat; all the sturdiest forms of welding are based on having oxygen available, and an atmosphere to quickly cool a molten welding material; even mechanically snapping pieces together often relies on the downward pull of gravity to keep everything stable and connected.

One possible way forwards is 3D printing. As with welding, most 3D printing materials require the convection of air to cool the construction material and fuse it to the growing object — but non all. NASA has been working on a potential space-based 3D printing projection called SpiderFab, aimed at creating "kilometer-scale" metal frameworks in infinite. SpiderFab would lay down the enormous skeleton of a space platform, for instance, and incorporate more complex components sent up from the surface. Not just tools and calculator systems but objects with wider materials demands, like windows, would likely come up from traditional factories and fabs.

SpiderFab

A concept image for SpiderFab.

So, the quickly-oncoming James Webb telescope, with its segmented, folding mirror, might not look and so out of date in the era of space-based structure; we probably won't be vacuum-press such high-precision objects equally telescope mirrors any time soon.

But the basic power to build in space will be important to develop if we're ever to make sizable colonies on the Moon, or other worlds. Putting downward roots in alien soil will crave many of the same skills as printing in space — and infinite is closer. If we're going to effort building structures on Mars, we'll demand to starting time with less ambitious goals.

This is a theme the space earth right now: modular, replaceable parts launched and assembled by robots. DARPA is nevertheless plugging away on Projection Phoenix, which is aimed at undoing some of the incredible waste of flesh's various infinite programs by scavenging one-time or crumbling satellites for parts, and assembling those parts into all-new infinite-based devices. Take a new central processing unit of measurement with newfangled sensing devices and send it up as office of a bulk shipment, so have Phoenix attach a scavenged solar panel or two, some thrusters that are in good condition, and annihilation else that can be found in Earth's ever-more-crowded graveyard orbit.

Project Phoenix Concept

A concept prototype for Project Phoenix.

Of course, unless we're going to exist making these scaffolds out of moon-dust, we're notwithstanding going to have to launch the raw materials the robot will use to print the basic skeleton of a structure, and attach prefabricated parts to that skeleton. In principle, you're withal launching the entire vehicle from Earth, but taking the packing efficiency to its logical decision — printer-ready cartridges or ingots of printing material packed squeamish and tightly, with no wasted volume on your launch vehicle.

Even with a vastly more affordable method of reaching space, similar a space elevator with a large lift capacity, space-based construction will remain necessary. There's enough turn a profit potential in space to fill up use of pretty much whatever launch capacity is available, so at that place'southward always going to be an incentive to pack light.