Robot 3D Printers To Turn Asteroids Into Spaceships
Posted on April 4, 2016The company Made In Space, Inc. has received money from NASA to research their Project RAMA: Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata.
They write, “The objective of this study is… to establish the concept feasibility of using the age-old technique of analog computers and mechanisms to convert entire asteroids into enormous autonomous mechanical spacecraft.”
In other words, they’ll use robot 3D printers to re-shape asteroids into mechanical spaceships, moving them into strategic orbits around the planet, or crashing them into bigger, Earth-threatening asteroids.
For a more thorough description of this, and other 2016 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program fund recipients, read “NASA’s Project RAMA Would Use Asteroids to Play Asteroids” at TheDrive.com.
And, here’s the Project RAMA description at nasa.gov.
Tags: asteroids, NASA, steampunk
Categories: Awesome, Real Asteroids