NASA Ames have shown that a simplified manufacturing and construction process is very powerful. More capable mass produced humanoid robots will be even more transformative. The NASA construction system has a mass of 10 kilograms per cubic meter. Water has a mass of 1000 kilograms per cubic meter. Lightweight and modular construction will create structures that have over 100 times the mass and volume of the SpaceX Starship. The current SpaceX Starship has over 1000 cubic meters of volume and with future SpaceX engines will be to take over 200 tons into space. Lightweight systems would be able to build 200,000 cubic meters of structure and the robots could mine and do even more construction.
NASA Ames team created and tested prefabricated voxels standardized reconfigurable building blocks. They built a set of 256 of those blocks—extremely strong 3D structures made with a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer called StattechNN-40CF. Each block had fastening interfaces on every side that could be used to reversibly attach them to other blocks and form a strong truss structure.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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“The NASA construction has 1% of the mass of water for the total construction volume.”
I’ve read this a dozen times and I’m still baffled what the point being made is.
When more words = more revenue, then it makes sense.
I had to think about that one. It’s an odd way to put it but I believe he was trying to say they are making such gauzy (yet hopefully serviceable) constructions that if you measured the volume occupied by one, and then took a mass of water that filled the same volume, it would have 100 the mass (or if the object was sitting in gravity, which it probably can’t, the water would a 100 times heavier).
It’s a meta construction foam.