Made in Space: 3-D Printing Could Change the Way Astronauts Travel | Short Film Showcase

The stories that I hear from people that were alive during Apollo—something happened with them when they watched people walking on the moon. It was this understanding that anything's possible. Those people ended up going on thinking that for sure people are going to go to Mars, and by the time the year 2000 comes around, we're sending people to Alpha Centauri. And it didn't happen.

There's like one fundamental reason why that future didn't happen right after Apollo. It's that everything we've ever put into space, man-made, has come from the surface of our planet. What if you didn't have to launch? What if everything in space one day was made in space? The moment you can start to manufacture things there, you completely change the game.

So this is your guys' first time, like, on the base, right? Out this area, it's a little weird, right? Like, a little apocalyptic almost. When most of us think of the new space race, we think of the shipbuilders—the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses and Richard Bransons—those renegade billionaires who have poured their fortunes into opening up space. We don't usually think of a couple of thirty-year-olds who have built one of the world's most advanced 3D printers. But that's exactly who's behind a little startup based in Silicon Valley called Made in Space.

And this is one of their co-founders, Jason Dunn.

"I went to college because I wanted to be called a rocket scientist. I started to work as an intern at NASA, and for that summer, Space Shuttle Discovery was in the high bay getting maintenance and readied for its next flight. I was falling in love with it. Then that summer, Charlie Bolden, the administrator, came to Kennedy Space Center and he talked to all the staff. He said how very soon the Space Shuttles were going to be retired. Here I am as an intern, thinking that I'm going to go work on the Space Shuttle that I just learned all about, and then it's gone. I had to start searching for, you know, where do I provide my impact? Where do I keep the course of humans living in space on track?"

"We were asking that question: why aren't people living on the moon right now? Why don't we have a base on Mars? While we could have? G looked at all the different ways to make a rocket better, we said, you know, what if instead of making better rockets, we looked at a way to not need rockets? To state the obvious, going to space is really expensive right now. It costs around $10,000 per pound to launch a payload into outer space. There currently are a treasure trove worth of spare parts on the International Space Station. They have backups and then backups for backups. Lots of weight, lots of space—over a billion dollars worth of parts, most of which will never be used—they're there just in case. You can't do that going to Mars. It's not cost effective; you can't afford that."

"And here's where we come to the breakthrough idea: what if we could make all those spare parts and tools in outer space? Enter the 3D printer. So this is where the magic happens. We're doing a Cribs episode earlier, so this is—we call this the bullpen. This is where pretty much most of the people, like engineers, work. This is our latest album cover, 'Iron Made in Space.' There are a lot of 3D printed stuff if you look around. This is Dylan, and this is Dylan. I actually have one at home that didn't finish printing, and the head's like half cut off. It's kind of creepy."

"Joking aside, it's one thing to talk about making a 3D printer for use in space, but to build it, that's another thing entirely. How do you develop a 3D printer for the space station without even knowing if current 3D printers could work in space? Can they work in weightlessness? So what we did is we went to NASA, and we told them the plan. We said if we could fly some 3D printers on a zero gravity airplane, and if they can work, they should be in space."

"The first real breakthrough for the company was when we actually built what we thought was a gravity-independent 3D printing technology, and then we were able to deploy that on that parabolic aircraft, which has the somewhat unfortunate name of the Vomit Comet, and actually experience it working. Yeah, 2011 was the first parabolic flights, and you know, when we first saw the results of our work, I was really happy 'cause we built something that not only functioned but now functioned in the environment we wanted it to function. A lot of people always say, 'Oh, I'm working on this,' or 'We've been working on this since, you know, 200X.' We're not working on it; we're just doing it."

"In 2011, they got a printer to work in zero gravity. But that was only step one. Step two: get a printer on the International Space Station. As soon as we figured out how to make a printer work in zero gravity by doing these research flights on the airplane, it took us almost exactly three years to get to the point where we have a printer ready for the Space Station. Launch is a scary time, and here's why. I had nothing to do with that rocket. I don't know if somebody had a bad day at work and decided not to do their job, and you know, threw a wrench somewhere it shouldn't be. That's the only part of the mission that we didn't have anything to do with."

"It was so tense leading up to that first time the printer turned on. We had tested it so many times, and we knew how well it would work, but we were still tense—like getting it set up, getting it installed. And then comes the moment to finally like turn it on and operate it, and it works. That moment marked the first time in the history of humanity that mankind had manufactured anything off the face of planet Earth."

"Where are we headed right now? We're headed into the conference room. We always keep this on display, and this is one of the prototypes of the printer that's on the space station. So this is a good example of a tool that we've built in space, and this actually came from the request of an astronaut asking for a ratchet. We designed this ratchet literally from nothing and had it printed in space five days later."

"The ability to manufacture objects, you know, off the face of the planet, to do manufacturing in space rather than having to rely on everything to be shipped up in a predefined shape is a fundamental shift in how we do things in space, and it really enables us to go, you know, that much further. So the big question is: what's next for Made in Space?"

"Well, in March of 2016, they sent a new printer to the space station, but they've got much, much bigger plans than that. They've already started talking about making printers that could print using moon or Martian dust. Sure, it sounds like science fiction, but come on—look what this scrappy gang of thirty-year-olds with nothing more than a dream accomplished in just six short years."

"When I was in college, I interned for NASA, and I did it because I love space. I love NASA, and I really wanted to make a difference there. But at the end of the day, I always felt like I was working to help somebody else achieve their dream. And instead of spending my time helping somebody else achieve their dream, I could spend my time working to achieve my own. You really need to find meaning and value out of what you're doing with your own life."