The 3D printers that have geeks excited usually print objects using some sort of plastic like ABS or PLA. A team out of Washington State University has been working with a different material that you can’t find at your local hobbyist shop: moon rocks. Well, simulated moon rocks, but the material did come from NASA.
When developing plans for long term missions on the lunar surface, the issue of transporting supplies is a common sticking point. It’s incredibly expensive to get cargo into orbit, so NASA is turning to 3D printing experts to see if lunar surface material, or regolith, could be used to fabricate new objects on-site.
Real moon rocks are in very short supply these days, so NASA provided Washington State University researchers with about 10 pounds of simulated moon rock that it manufactures for research purposes. Consumer-grade 3D printers melt plastic spools to build objects layer by layer, so the team first had to figure out if anything like that was possible with moon rocks.
The WSU team eventually discovered that you can melt lunar regolith into the right consistency for 3D printing, but it has to hit 4046° F (2,230° C). This would make the process extremely energy intensive, but likely still a better deal than shooting building materials into space. The printer used in the process would also have to be incredibly rugged to survive these conditions.
Objects printed from melted moon rocks are a little unattractive, and tend to cool unevenly. While stressing that the process does work, researchers suggest that additive manufacturing, or supplementing the melted regolith with other materials brought up from Earth, could be the key. Such a process could dramatically increase the quality of the lunar building materials while still reducing the mass that needs to be launched from Earth.