A reported by MSNBC, awards were announced on August 10, 2011 under the auspices of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC. The space agency said the concepts were chosen on the basis of their potential for enhancing future space missions.
The grants will go toward further study, to determine whether the ideas could help NASA meet future mission requirements. "These innovative concepts have the potential to mature into the transformative capabilities NASA needs to improve our current space mission operations, seeding the technology breakthroughs needed for the challenging space missions in NASA's future," NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun said in today's announcement.
The 30 recipients were chosen from hundreds of proposals, One of the proposals was submitted by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Khoshnevis’ proposed project concerns the use of his robotic construction technology, Contour Crafting, for building structures on the moon. This is Dr. Khoshnevis’ second NASA grant on the subject. In the proposed project economically viable and reliable building systems and tool sets are being sought, examined and tested for extraterrestrial habitat and infrastructure buildup.
The project plans to utilize a unique architecture weaving the Contour Crafting automated building technology with designs for assisting rapid buildup of an initial operational capability lunar base. Using the CC technology, the project intends to draw up a detailed plan for a high fidelity simulation at NASA’s D-RATS facility, to construct certain crucial infrastructure elements in order to evaluate the merits, limitations and feasibility of adapting and using the CC technology for extraterrestrial application.
Elements suggested to be built and tested include roads, landing pads and aprons, shade walls, dust barriers, thermal and micrometeorite protection shields and dust-free platforms as well as other built up structures utilizing the well known in-situ-resource utilization (ISRU) strategy.
Several unique systems including the Lunar Electric Rover, the unpressurized Chariot rover, the versatile light-weight crane and Tri-Athlete cargo transporter as well as the habitat module mockups and a new generation of spacesuits are undergoing coordinated tests at NASA’s D-RATS.
This project intends to draw up a detailed synergetic plan to utilize these maturing systems coupled with the CC fabrication technology, tailored for swift and reliable lunar infrastructure development. This proposal intends to increase astronaut safety, improve buildup performance, ameliorate lunar dust interference and concerns, and attempts to reduce time-to-commission, all in an economic manner.
As part of this project, a figure-of-merit methodology will be created and employed togain some quantitative insight into the efficiency of using the CC technology to augment these other systems already in place.
Automated building technology in which CC plays an integral role, will revolutionize the way structures are built on Earth, in dense urban environments, in difficult-to-build and difficult-to-service sites, or in remote and hostileregions of the globe.
The CC technology has potential to improve materials handling and schedules, will reduce the need for hard physical labor, assigning humans to a strictly supervisory role, eliminate issues relating to human safety and produce intricate, aesthetically refined designs and structures.
Space architecture in general and lunar structures in particular will also provide a rich new aesthetic vocabulary for architects to employ in the design and creation of buildings that employ high technology and building information modeling that is vital for optimizing use of materials and energy that is critical to building economics.
