Every year NASA selects a range of speculative projects through its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. It is through this program that Made In Space (MIS) has received an award for Project RAMA. The project is partly named after an Arthur C. Clarke story where an empty, automated colony ship built in an asteroid arrives in the Solar System - the initials in this case stand for Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata.
© Adrian Mann
Based in Mountain View, California, MIS was founded in 2010 with the aim of using additive manufacturing - or 3D printing - to dramatically reduce the costs of operations in space. In additive manufacturing a supply material, often a plastic filament or metal dust, is fused together into objects rather than cut out of a bigger piece. For launches from Earth this would save volume and mass, and space missions would be able to print spare parts as needed. MIS supplied a printer to the International Space Station in order to test the process in microgravity.