NEW YORK: NASA and America Makes jointly launched a $2.25 million competition to design a 3D-printed home for astronauts on Mars at last week’s Bay Area Maker Faire. The hope is that 3D printing and the incorporation of spacecraft waste and materials from the alien world can in turn help address affordable housing on Earth.
NASA has a list of instances in which research for space travel also transformed life on the home planet, including early spacecraft structural analysis that was later expanded to cars and roller coasters, and research into water purification for the International Space Station that was implemented for clean drinking water on Earth. So, while throwing such big bucks at a crowdsourced project might seem frivolous, there is a potential that the results could accelerate the development of technology applicable to our daily lives, especially considering the extreme design challenges of Mars and the incentive to experiment with unconventional building materials like planetary dust.
The competition is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges project, which was started in 2005 and offers monetary awards for public ideas, bringing nongovernmental sources into the organization’s technology development. From a cynical perspective, it’s a great way to get a lot of ideas without a lot of money; from a more positive one, it’s also a way to diversify the ideas that are being considered for our future space travel, whether that means better astronaut gloves or lunar landers.
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