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NASA Unboxes Delivery of First 3D-Printed Items Made in Space

Watch Quincy Bean, the principal investigator for the International Space Station's printer, remove and inspect the first items made in space with a 3D printer. To protect the space-manufactured items, they must remain in bags until inspection is complete and testing begins at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. More than 20 parts were unboxed on April 6, 2015, at Marshall's Additive Manufacturing Laboratory. Additive manufacturing has the potential to change the way we resupply the space station and will be critical for deep space missions to Mars, asteroids, and other places.

Topics:
Aerospace Manufacturing & Prototyping Rapid Prototyping & Tooling Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 So, um yea, In front of me we have a box that contains the first ever parts that were built off the Earth’s surface. They were built on the International Space Station. So, yea, let’s open this thing up. Alright. More paperwork, and a copy of the 1149. A lot of foam. So let’s see. Bag Number 1. Looks like, wow. That’s sealed up pretty good. Some scissors would help. I don’t want to cut

    00:00:51 into the bags that they are in And this is a Ziplock bag. So, let’s see this is 018. This is a tensile coupon. We use this to test mechanical samples. 014 Tensile Coupon 3. No. Ames CubeSat part. A little clip for a CubeSat. So this one is pretty interesting. It’s a ratchet that was built. And it was also uplinked from the ground. It wasn’t on the printer’s memory to begin with. Let’s see how

    00:01:45 this one turned out. Actually, it looks pretty good. So this ratchet is actually supposed to move. I don’t want to mess with it too much right now. It’s really just kind of a proof of concept that you can build functional parts in space, so the astronauts , if they need a ratchet , whatever other tool they might need, they can just build it on demand and not have to wait a month or two for the

    00:02:12 resupply mission. 010, 019, 017. That’s all that’s in the box. This one I am excited to see because it was actually built with several cantilevers with no support structure. So with this, we’ll see how far, how much of an overhang we can build and still make a geometrically good quality part. My favorite part out of all of these. So that now that we have everything out of the box, we’ll

    00:03:03 start testing them. First, they’ll go. First they’ll get their pictures taken, so we can get an official comparison of the ground control samples, which we’ve already taken those pictures. So if there’s any difference between the part any visible difference, we’ll be able to take note of that. Then, they’ll go through what’s called structured light scanning, so it will scan the outer

    00:03:29 geometry, and compare that back to the original. CAD model. We really want to find out if there’s any difference in how the layers adhere to each other in micro gravity versus 1-g. And the printer is still on the space station, and we’re gearing up for phase II. We have more practical parts. This is mostly test coupons. So the next phase of prints will be practical

    00:03:59 coupons, more like the ratchet, but different tools. Tools and items that the astronauts could potentially use.