China’s Chang’e 8 Mission Will Bring 3D Printers to the Moon

beijingwalker · Apr 25, 2023

China’s Chang’e 8 Mission Will Bring 3D Printers to the Moon

We’ll need buildings to live and work in on the Moon, and China’s hoping some of them can be 3D printed.
By Adrianna Nine April 25, 2023

Credit: NASA
Humanity’s lunar life ambitions introduce a number of practical questions, many of them involving the structures we’ll live and work in once we establish a long-term presence on the Moon. Because transporting conventional building materials into space would be astronomically expensive, space agencies worldwide are working to figure out how they can leverage the Moon’s natural resources. One idea is to 3D-print bricks or whole structures using lunar soil, but agencies will need to bring 3D printers to the Moon to test that out.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) seems to be planning to do just that. According to the Communist Party-owned publication China Daily (reported via Reuters), the CNSA’s forthcoming Chang'e 8 mission will bring “a robot tasked with making ‘lunar soil bricks’” to the Moon, allowing the agency to try its hand at on-site materials manufacturing.

China’s 2020 lunar mission, Chang’e 5, brought back the country’s first lunar soil samples for lab testing. While the purpose of these samples was to help scientists understand the Moon’s recent history (that is, from the past 1.2 billion years), they’ll also guide the CNSA as it constructs equipment capable of turning lunar resources into building materials. The agency’s Chang’e 8 robot appears to be the first of these implements.

China Daily reported that Chang’e 8’s probe would help the CNSA investigate the Moon’s mineral composition, which impacts how easily natural resources might be processed into bricks. This will affect how quickly the CNSA can get a 3D printing robot up and running on-site. Ideally, the agency will start building a base on the Moon using lunar soil within the next five years.

"If we wish to stay on the Moon for a long time, we need to set up stations by using the Moon's own materials," CNSA scientist Wu Weiren told China Daily.

China isn’t the only country aiming to 3D print structures on the Moon. Late last year, NASA awarded Texas-based ICON—the company behind the 3D-printed Mars Dune Alpha habitat—$57 million to develop a system called Olympus. When the system is finished in 2026, it’ll use a high-powered laser to create building materials out of Moon dust. After that, NASA hopes to use Olympus to develop similar materials on Mars.