By Jason Dunn — Singularity Hub
One day everything in space will be made in space, and this will radically increase the potential for human space exploration.
I recently read a novella that explores this very idea (see below for an excerpt). Cory Doctorow’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon” appears in Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, an anthology of hopeful, ambitious, technically-grounded science fiction stories set in the near future. In the story, a small team takes on the daunting mission of launching a machine to the Moon that collects lunar regolith (moon dirt) and 3D prints structural housing panels for a future settlement.
This idea is at the heart of a decades-old quest to create truly sustainable and Earth-independent space exploration. In the summer of 1980, a team at NASA Ames Research Center showed a simple set of machines could be sent to the lunar surface to mine resources and replicate themselves.