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Students! NASA Wants To 3D Print Your Tool Design In Space!

Attention young ones! NASA is looking for future engineers, and they want to start by printing out your design in space. That's above the cloud, by the way.


(NASA space tool challenge to future engineers)

If you are a K thru 12 student in the United States, your challenge is To Design a Space Tool. The ability to 3D print in space is a game-changer for space exploration. Just think about it, when astronauts are on Mars, they will have the ability to make whatever they need, on demand, even though Earth is just a little blue glimmer in the sky. That's exactly why we are challenging our next generation of explorers to start designing parts for space now. We want students to create and submit a digital 3D model of a tool that they think astronauts need in space. If you win, your design will become a part of space history as one of the first things ever to be 3D Printed in Space.

Perhaps soon we will have orbiting factories, like the ones in Arthur C. Clarke's still excellent 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise.

"...What is it?"

"The result of two hundred years of solid-state physics. For whatever good that does, it is a continuous pseudo-one dimensional diamond crystal - though it's not actually pure carbon. There are several trace elements in carefully controlled amounts. It can be mass-produced only in the orbiting factories, where there's no gravity to interfere with the growth process."

Via Future Engineers.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/21/2014)

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