Startups Upending Space Industry, Accelerating Space Exploration: Part I: Making Stuff in Space

posted by Banning Garrett on October 18, 2016 - 11:58am

There is a dynamic underway in the space industry that is disrupting the way space technology is developed and deployed.  This new dynamic may accelerate the expansion of human presence in space and the colonization of the moon and Mars. This latest area of “democratization” of technology will also open the use of space to a wide range of players, including non-state actors, all over the planet.  Some of what the startups are doing theoretically could have been done by the aerospace giants but were likely inconceivable within their business models.

The most celebrated cluster of “startups” reshaping the industry are the big players financed by tech billionaires Elon Musk with Space X and Jeff Bezos with his company Blue Origin. These companies are not only seeking to challenge the legacy aerospace giants like the Lockheed Martin-Boeing joint venture, United Launch Alliance, but also to lower the cost of access to space by a factor of 10, to $1,000 per pound from the current $10,000.  To do so, both companies are building reusable launch vehicles and have succeeded in the hitherto impossible task of returning the first stage rocket for a precision landing.  For Musk, the ultimate objective is developing the capacity for launching missions to colonize Mars in the 2020s. 

This privatization of space technology has gone a step farther with the use of “exponential technologies” - that is, technologies that have benefited from Moore’s Law of growing exponentially more powerful while becoming exponentially cheaper, like the microchip, cloud computing, big data analytics, computational biology, the Internet of Things, and virtually all other digitized technologies.  One of the technologies that has benefited from this ecosystem has been additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, which, although invented three decades ago, has rapidly increased in capability while declining in cost in the last few years.  This made possible the seemingly unlikely development that the first 3D printer on the International Space Station (ISS) was not designed and built by Lockheed, Boeing or some other major industry player.  Rather, it was built by a startup, Made-in-Space (MIS), a company that was four years old with a total staff of 10 people at the time of launch.  MIS is located at NASA Ames Research Park in California and now has a staff of about 30.

MIS was founded by a group from Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program class of 2010 who were committed to accelerating space colonization and exploration.  They concluded that this would not be possible unless humans could make things in space rather than lift everything out Earth’s gravity well.  To build in space, they concluded, would require 3D printers. 

MIS obtained NASA support (and a couple of SBIR grants) for developing a zero-gravity printer, which was certified and launched to the ISS in September 2014, four years after the startup was created (and after some 400 microgravity parabolas on the “Vomit Comet” to test the technology) and 11 years ahead of NASA’s roadmap, which planned to have the first 3D printer on the ISS in 2025, according to MIS personnel.  A second 3D printer, the Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF), owned and operated remotely by MIS, was successfully launched and installed on the ISS in March of 2016.  These initial printers can use advanced polymers for printing on demand spare parts and other items needed for the space station.  An item can be designed on the ground and the design file emailed to the ISS for immediate production.  In addition, NASA has contracted with MIS as well as another another startup, Tethers Unlimited, to develop  recyclers for the space station to turn waste or unused plastics into feedstock for the 3D printers.

MIS has ambitious plans for 3D printing in space.  According to CTO Jason Dunn, “As a company we are founded with the idea that these are the technologies for people to truly live in space.  They need to be able to manufacture in space.  You can build things in space that are enormous if you turn the printer box inside out.  We have studied what big things can be built - arrays, support structures.  We are at the beginning of where this technology heads.” 

In fact, the next stage in 3D printing is to develop the capacity for printing in space - outside the ISS - and to print structures of unlimited size.  The AMF has a limited-size build within a box.  But MIS has developed a printer that can print and extrude in the vacuum of space. The company won a $20 million NASA “Tipping Point Technologies” contract in November 2015 to “develop the necessary technologies and subsystems which will enable the first additive manufacturing, aggregation, and assembly of large and complex systems in space without astronaut extravehicular activity.”  According to MIS, the Archinaut project will enable creating “large space-based structures such as space stations that have been a once-in-a-generation endeavor” by eliminating the “lift capacity limits and the high risk and low availability of astronaut EVA for assembly.”  But in this case, the startup is not going it alone.  Rather, MIS is the prime contractor for Archinaut, with Northrup Grumman and Oceaneering Space Systems as subcontractors.  Other startups in the UK working with the European Space Agency are also working on the challenge of manufacturing in space and on Mars and the Moon.  

Artists’ Rendering of Archinaut-3D printed structures in space

NASA is increasingly factoring 3D printing into its long-term as well as its more immediate plans.  In May 2015, NASA announced a challenge to design habitats for the Moon and Mars that could be 3D printed using local materials, with or without recycled materials. In May 2016, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said that advanced robots, some of which might be humanoid, could be sent to Mars to 3D print and assemble habitats and other equipment that astronauts would need when they arrived.  MIS has proposed using Martian surface material for printing structures on the planet.

It is instructive to ask why the major NASA contractors did not develop the 3D printers that have the potential to create a paradigm shift in space exploration.  There are probably many reasons, but a key factor is likely the business model. MIS could develop the 3D printer fueled primarily by passion, an SBIR grant, and small NASA contracts, and a total cost of about $3 million.  They did not foresee a lucrative market for the 3D printer on the space station but hoped to sell time on the printer to companies, universities and others who might want to experiment with printing materials and structures in micro gravity.  This was a very small potential market for corporations engaged in billion-dollar projects for NASA.  Moreover, the cost for these corporations to develop a zero-g printer would likely be far higher, perhaps by an order of magnitude, and thus their net ROI (return on investment) would be even smaller for ISS printer services than is likely for MIS. 

Besides the on-demand advantage of making things in space, any device, such as a satellite, an antenna, or solar array, that is manufactured on the earth needs to withstand one gravity to be constructed and up to six gravities for eight minutes during launch into space - and then it is deployed for use in a microgravity environment.  If the same item is built in space, it needs far less bulk and strength to be built and deployed since it has no weight and faces very little gravitational stress.  Thus, the same amount of mass can be used to build much more product.  Moreover, the item that is launched from earth has to be packaged and certified for launch and cannot exceed strict size limits imposed by the launch vehicle.  Items made in space do not require launch certification or face strict size limits, especially if they are built by Archinaut-type robotic printers outside the space station.  Launching only the raw feedstock also allows for volume and mass optimization of the launched material.

Since 3D printing could lead to making almost everything needed for space exploration in space, including giant antenna and solar arrays, large structures, rocket engines, and eventually even space stations and spacecraft.  This would sharply reduce the need for building the equipment on earth and launching them into space.  Only the raw materials would have to be launched into space (until they can be acquired in space from the moon or asteroids) for the “printable” parts of the equipment, which would greatly reduce the cost and detach manufacturing in space from access to feedstock from earth.  Under a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Award, MIS has proposed an idea for the late 2030’s to leverage 3D printing and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to turn asteroids into spacecraft to bring them into earth orbit where the could be mined.   

While startups like MIS can leverage “democratized” technologies to disrupt the space industry, clearly they cannot be the main private industry drivers of space exploration, which will continue to rely on large aerospace corporations as well as NASA and other government space agencies.  But the startups can challenge the business models of the aerospace giants, forcing them to change or face the rise of new challengers - like Space X and Blue Origin are challenging ULA for launch services and as Tesla is challenging Detroit for designing and building the car of the future. 

3D printing and other democratized technologies have the potential to substantially lower the cost of space exploration, including production and deployment of satellites, spacecraft and eventually space stations.  3D printing is also likely to accelerate the development of space, from more rapid construction of satellites and even space craft to the colonization of the moon and Mars.

Other countries, including China and Russia as well as the European Space Agency, are also exploring 3D printing in space and will presumably take advantage of this technology to accelerate their programs.  This could lead to intensified intelligence and military competition in space but also international cooperation to accelerate space development and human exploration of the solar system and beyond.