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Towards out of earth manufacturing: overview of the ESA materials and processes activities on manufacturing in space

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Abstract

Since the early 2010s, the European Space Agency (ESA) has increased its activities on developing in-situ manufacturing solutions, to overcome the limitations related to fairing size, launch mass capabilities or logistic missions cost and complexity. Technology development activities have addressed promising processes for manufacturing in space, as well as associated manufacturing equipment concepts and adequate materials. The activities have covered a range of aspects related to the needs of future sustainable human and robotic exploration activities, on orbit or at the surface of celestial bodies. This includes construction of infrastructure elements, manufacturing of required tools and spare parts or in-situ synthesis of food and living tissues. Increasing focus is also dedicated to on-orbit manufacturing of large structures in space, for various applications. From initial punctual studies on specific processes, a more and more holistic approach to in-situ manufacturing is taken. This article presents a non-exhaustive overview of technology development activities conducted by ESA in the field of materials and processes for manufacturing out of Earth.

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Data availability

Data on the activities reported in this manuscript can be found in the listed references. Data from the activities run under the contracts listed in the “Funding” section can also be found in the activities’ final reports (available on demand).

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the industrial and academic partners who participated to the activities mentioned in this article, under ESA contracts.

Funding

The ESA activities reported in this article were funded by ESA, under the ESA contracts listed below, with the exceptions of [23, 25,26,27, 31] and [32] which refer to other activities where ESA provided a contribution (funding information for those can be found in the relevant references): Contract no. 4000022835 “3D Printed Building Blocks Using Lunar Soil”. Contract no. 4000114191 “Limited resources manufacturing technologies”. Contract no. 4000122380 “Conceiving a Lunar Base Using 3D Printing Technologies”. Contract no. 4000112759 “3D printing of a model building block for a lunar base outer shell”. Contract no. 4000114065 “Breadboard development for in-orbit demonstration of additive layer manufacturing technologies”. Contract no. 4000123640 “3D Bioprinting of Living Tissue for Space Exploration”. Contract no. 4000115893 “In-orbit manufacturing of very long booms”. Contract no. 4000111600 “Sustainable Materials Concepts”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Space Agency, ESTEC, Keplerlaan 1, PO Box 299, 2200 AG, Noordwijk-ZH, The Netherlands

    Advenit Makaya, Laurent Pambaguian, Tommaso Ghidini, Thomas Rohr, Ugo Lafont & Alexandre Meurisse

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  1. Advenit Makaya
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  2. Laurent Pambaguian
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  3. Tommaso Ghidini
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  4. Thomas Rohr
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  5. Ugo Lafont
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  6. Alexandre Meurisse
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Correspondence to Advenit Makaya.

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Makaya, A., Pambaguian, L., Ghidini, T. et al. Towards out of earth manufacturing: overview of the ESA materials and processes activities on manufacturing in space. CEAS Space J 15, 69–75 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-022-00428-1

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