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A Texas company aims to bring its innovative approach to home construction to the final frontier.
ICON, an Austin-based startup known for 3d print houses here on Earth, has just launched Project Olympus, an ambitious effort to develop a space-based building system. The program will eventually help humanity settle on the Moon and Mars, if all goes according to plan.
“Since the founding of ICON, we have been thinking about building outside the world. It is a surprisingly natural progression if you wonder about the ways in which additive building and 3D printing can create a better future for humanity”, co-founder and Executive Director Jason Ballard said in a company statement.
“I am confident that learning to build on other worlds will also provide the breakthroughs necessary to solve the housing challenges we face in this world,” said Ballard. “These are mutually reinforcing efforts.”
Related: 10 ways 3D printing could transform space travel
Project Olympus will receive a boost from a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract that ICON recently signed with the US Air Force to expand the capabilities of its 3D printing technology.
The four-year deal is worth $ 14.55 million, according to the Austin Business Journal. (You can find the middle story here, but it’s behind a paywall.) NASA is contributing 15% of the SBIR sum, ICON representatives told Space.com.
NASA’s interest in ICON technology makes sense. The space agency is working, through its Artemis manned lunar exploration program, to establish a long-term human presence on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s. Making this happen will require extensive use of lunar resources, including water ice (for life support and rocket fuel) and lunar earth (for construction materials), NASA officials have emphasized.
A devotion similar to “living off the land“It will likely be necessary for sustained human exploration of Mars, an ambitious goal that Artemis will inform and promote,” NASA officials have said.
As part of the recently announced SBIR agreement, ICON will partner with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to test a variety of processing and printing technologies using simulated lunar soil. The research will build on the technology that ICON demonstrated in 2018 during the 3D printed habitat challengesaid company representatives.
“We want to increase the level of technology readiness and test systems to demonstrate that it would be feasible to develop a large-scale 3D printer that could build infrastructure on the Moon or Mars,” Corky Clinton, Associate Director of the Office of Science and Technology by Marshall. said in a NASA statement. “The team will use what we learn from the lunar simulant testing to design, develop and demonstrate prototype elements for a large-scale additive building system.”
The Olympus Project will also have the help of other associations. For example, ICON is partnering with two architecture firms in the program: SEArch + (Space Exploration Architecture) and Denmark-based BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group.
“To explain the power of architecture, ‘to shape’ is the Danish word for design, which literally means to shape what has not yet been shaped. This becomes fundamentally clear when we venture beyond Earth and begin to imagine how we are we will build and live in whole new worlds, “said BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group founder and creative director Bjarke Ingels in the ICON statement.
“With ICON, we are pioneering new frontiers, both materially, technologically and environmentally,” said Ingels. “The answers to our challenges on Earth could very well be found on the Moon.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
