1 CONTOUR CRAFTING SIMULATION PLAN FOR LUNAR SETTLEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE BUILD-UP NIAC Phase-I Final Project Report – October 2012 B. Khoshnevis, A. Carlson, N. Leach and M. Thangavelu INTRODUCTION Economically viable and reliable building systems and tool sets are being sought, examined and tested for extraterrestrial infrastructure buildup. This project focused on a unique architecture weaving the robotic building construction technology with designs for assisting rapid buildup of initial operational capability Lunar and Martian bases. The project aimed to study new methodologies to construct certain crucial infrastructure elements in order to evaluate the merits, limitations and feasibility of adapting and using such technologies for extraterrestrial application. Current extraterrestrial settlement buildup philosophy holds that in order to minimize the materials needed to be flown in, at great transportation costs, strategies that maximize the use of locally available resources must be adopted. Tools and equipment flown as cargo from Earth are proposed to build required infrastructure to support future missions and settlements on the Moon and Mars. The goal stated in our Phase I proposal was a high fidelity demonstration at D-RATS to be conducted at the conclusion of the Phase II study. In the course of the Phase I study, however, it became clear that such demonstration was neither possible (due to the maximum Phase II budget limitation and the cost of NASA assets and related overhead expenses to support such demonstrations), nor necessary (due to NASA's low TRL expectation of Phase II results). These important facts were revealed to us only after interacting with the NIAC administrators and meetings with potential future partners at JPL and KSC. Accordingly, it was decided by the team that in order to make best use of resources we should investigate novel directions in the adaptation of our fabrication technologies by using in-house laboratories and to produce truly useful technologies and data, and then proceed with high fidelity demonstration at a later opportunity when sufficient resources become available. Furthermore, we have recognized that in addition to our building scale 3D printing technology called Contour Crafting, variations of some of our other fabrication technologies under development as well as some new technologies dedicated to planetary applications that we plan to develop are suitable for construction of infrastructure elements such as regolith based ceramic tiles. Our Phase I activities have been involved on many fronts. So far we have successfully engaged in team building efforts, we have conducted extensive literature review in related domains and engaged in architectural conceptual design of planetary outpost elements, we have performed materials and process studies, built experimental machines and conducted laboratory experiments, conducted structural design and analysis studies, jointly taught a new Moon Studio architecture course, created several high fidelity visuals, made presentations at three conferences (an additional presentation scheduled for a fabrication https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20160010607 2019-04-29T07:45:45+00:00Z