Tag: Digital Fabrication

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MARS NEST VR

Paloma Gonzalez PhD (C) MIT Boston, USA
Alejandro Weiss MPUrb UC, LABVA Valdivia Chile
Aníbal Fuentes Architect UC, Biofab Santiago de Chile
Jose Hernández PhD (C) KTH Royal IT Stockholm, Sweden
Juan Pablo Ugarte Doctor Design (C) Harvard, Boston USA

VR Modeling of the Centennial Challenge NEST proposal

The NEST project consisted of a 3D-printed settlement for Mars exploration, built from local materials and capable of accommodating four inhabitants. As part of the Nasa 3DPH Challenge, this project was defined by the extreme conditions posed by the Martian environment: a low gravity (0.3 G), lack of breathable air and surface liquid water, as well as high levels of harmful solar and cosmic radiation (Harbaugh, 2015). 

The architectural concept is a Nested Environment-Settlement Technology (NEST). This means designing a series of nested concentric habitable volumes and the 3D print of safety structural layers in between (figure 1). This allowed us to add barriers between the exterior Martian environment and exterior to better control environmental hazards and provide protection for the occupants and machinery operations. Moreover, having many volumes made possible to organize the habitat functions and zones for activities (Figure 2). Specifically, the concept included an external protected volume, as a protected zone for drones and rovers from dust and other environmental hazards; a pressurized volume for the growth garden and in between spaces; and a habitable net volume for the astronauts’ dwellings (figure 3)

These zones are defined by three separate different layers, fabricated by distinct 3d print materials. These were defined as an Exolayer, for the outer layer printed with mud; a Mesolayer, as the in between layer printed with a silicate-glass 3d print approach; and an Endolayer, thought to be printed with PLA and other materials for the habitable and functional membrane of the building.  

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Keystone Urbanism by Redesigning Asteroids

asteroid wheel station (1)
asteroid wheel station (3)
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Carla Muttoni Founder & Director Space Robotics
Nicolas Acevedo UTSM

Proposal

Our proposal is defined by a pipeline construction and mining system that distributes liquids, minerals and eventually habitat, to the entire outpost in a planetoid located in the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter. This principle is inspired by a biomimetic system regarding a plant’s xylem, feeding the entire city through a root network. This approach ensures a more controlled temperature, reduces exposure to cosmic radiation, helps maintain air pressure, secures transportation and is easier to produce due to the boring and tunnel machinery. This makes rocky asteroids good candidates for Inter-paraterraformation. Because mining at near zero G is easier, we designed a continuous pipeline to shutter material from boring & refinery to cargo. It is then redistributed or exchanged with other outposts. 

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Rutina Error

“The epidemic functioned as a kind of trigger that brought out the tensions that already existed in our societies “ Slavoj Žižek talking about the Chilean Revolution and The Covid-19 Pandemic.

Before the 2020 pandemic, in 2019 my country Chile was in turmoil, 5 million people on the streets demanding dignity. People started to talk about the “ Social explosion” as the collective demand of structural democratic and economic system reforms. Something in my mind changed that day. I had all these ideas about Chile being the most stable country in the region, and they suddenly vanished leaving a vacuum that my mind started to fill with oniric images that have continued throughout the pandemic, for me this is a “ Social Implosion”.

Since 2018 New York City is my home, so during the “Social Explosion” I mostly watched the debates on Chilean TV with a current theme: the system was slowly but relentlessly collapsing like a badly tied balloon filled with Post Dictatorship Neoliberalism Friedman air. By ear, the people act against uncheck inequalities, the overpowered patriarchal power protest of “A Rapist in Your Path” by Las Tesis, antidemocratic blocks inherited from facism, and a large extecetra. On the eye, My timeline was flooded with massive gatherings of my countrymen and the brutal response by the police. I tried to support family and friends remotely during the “Social Explosion”, while they were part of the million Chilean March, paradoxically, I live this in partial isolation. 

Parallel to that, I had a plentiful of dreams that had a charge symbolism from the “social implosion idea” and I registered all of them with the aim to create something. Since art school, I kept a dream journal with the purpose of dialoguing with my unconsciousness by recording the most significant images. In return, I believe to have a better understanding of the feelings and processes and a baseline for art creation. One periodical dream during that time that has come back in the pandemic goes like this: I was sitting in a dining room, at my childhood suburban house in Santiago, the table and the chairs feel like from an old church school (they always did), there are people that I don’t recognize where there should be my sisters and parents. What’s more, there are empty chairs between them (like social distancing), making it hard to communicate. Also, and the table is empty and we are waiting for the food to arrive (but never does). Now, if I look to the sides and end of the room, there are arches (like my house had) and across those are endless tables with similar faceless and numb people. I can’t get up or talk, but I heard a loud group of people chanting and protesting from the streets behind me. 

Because of this dream, I was compelled to make a study about bringing this image to “life” by 3d printing the scene of a faceless person sitting in a Catholic Chair, added to the idea of empty chairs, a figure that Biden has used to describe Covid-19 related death. But I was compelled to subvert my dream and randomly aggregate the pieces in ways that reflected the way my countrymen were doing in Santiago. In this process I encountered a lot of errors in the 3d printing machine and I decided to go along and force those errors to continue the idea of the tensions and decay between when the collapsed systems and the implosion of forms. In the future will continue this idea of bringing this aggregation of and try to manifest the error by 3d printing in different substrates like, mineral or fungus. And different Aggregations, like the shape of a head, representing the vote my country did to end Pinochet-Constitution and bring a new collective and diverse mind into the building of new idea of Social. 

Michelson, C. (2020, October 16). Slavoj Žižek: “La dignidad es la respuesta popular al cinismo abierto de los que están en el poder”. Retrieved November 17, 2020, from https://www.latercera.com/tendencias/noticia/slavoj-zizek-la-dignidad-es-la-respuesta-popular-al-cinismo-abierto-de-los-que-estan-en-el-poder/INTXZWPPHRHPFPMSJF2NUK7QIU/ NADYA, T. (2020, September 23). LASTESIS Is on the 2020 TIME 100 List. Retrieved November 26, 2020, from https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2020/5888485/lastesis/

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N3ST, Nested 3d printed Settlement proposal for the Nasa Mars 3d printed Habitat Challenge 2015

Paloma Gonzalez PhD (C) MIT Boston, USA
Alejandro Weiss MPUrb UC, LABVA Valdivia Chile
Aníbal Fuentes Architect UC, Biofab Santiago de Chile
Jose Hernández PhD (C) KTH Royal IT Stockholm, Sweden
Juan Pablo Ugarte Doctor Design (C) Harvard, Boston USA

N3ST PROPOSAL BY THE UNIVERSAL PROJECTS TEAM

Project consists of developing a human habitat, built from native materials and with a capacity to welcome exploration on Mars. This project is defined by three main conditions: a hostile environment, a low gravity setting (0.3 G) and a high degree of uncertainty. We propose a failsafe design, taking into consideration the technological capabilities that will exist in 2030, and with the following three notions driving the design: Redundancy, manifested in the creation of different inhabitable layers; Simplicity, expressed in simple design principles, while embedding complexity in processes that do not compromise the operation’s success; and Incrementalism, or the idea that the complexity of the design comes from the overlapping or addition of multiple, simple operations.

DIGITAL FABRICATION EXOLAYER STRATEGY

Martian atmospheric conditions stabilization is a pressing issue related with inhabitation. Winds, sandstorms, thermal variations and lethal solar radiation are all threats to explorers’ living conditions. What we propose is an exolayer layer made of a vertical foam sandwich, made from molten silicates of the Martian surface (i.e. Olivine), and a gaseous phase made of hydrogen from the water present in the Martian soil. This hydrogen is crucial to sift the high-energy particles from cosmic radiation, therefore protecting the astronauts. The 3D printing process will allow us to manipulate the amount of hydrogen and molten silicates in order to optimize the layer’s structural performance.

N3ST00

This is the first draft and idea about how to build something in an hostile environment. There is a green organism in the Atacama desert called “Yareta”. What makes this evergreen perennial Plant unique is the fact that they have a super park leaf system that grows half inch per year. We were inspired by the fact that the big ones are thousands of years old, thriving in the hardest and driest place on earth. We wanted those ideas to be part of our proposal, an environment that slowly but relentlessly expands and adapts to the harsh Mars environment conditions.

N3ST01

In this previous iteration, less detailed in the exterior layer, we developed the plug-and-play interior. The Endo Layer constitutes the Habitable Volume; its design meets all the necessary functions for the development of the astronaut’s activities. This layer makes up the furniture, equipment and hosts the resources supply network. The morphology of this layer will be determined by the triple intersection of an explorer’s body movements, the object’s purpose, and the construction system.

N3ST02

In the second iteration, we developed the idea of aligning multi-material printing with failsafe principles. In short, different material systems with different objectives should be implemented. For instance, the external layer has different material and properties, and the second layer is a reinforced, sealed glass-bubble structure, due to the need for a pressurized volume defined by the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS).