Next Vacation Spot: Mars
Any plans for your next vacation/trip? Bahamas, maybe? Been there. How about Alaska? Done that. How about Hawaii? Again?! So you have been pretty much everywhere, but I bet there is one place you haven’t been that some smartypants engineers are talking about going. In fact, no one has ever been there. And the first people who do will most likely never come home. Are you ready? 3..2..1 blast off! How about going on a one way trip to Mars? And that is what NASA is has smoking on the burner, they plan to blast a group of scientists to settle down on the planet Mars. To do it, they will have to have to use some fancy shmancy tricks from 3D printing and 3D laser scanning services.
They have planned their vacation
So who on Earth would want to leave this ball and live on a planet with no Walmart or Chic-fil-a? Apparently the guys at NASA do. The plan is to blast them away and to see if they can survive (I won’t be surprised if it becomes a reality TV show). No 4-star hotels on Mars is what I’ve heard, at least Wikipedia didn’t mention any. The planet Mars is not going to be a very easy vacation spot for many reasons, and it’s not because Frommer’s didn’t leave travel tips. The atmosphere is thin on Mars, and the atmospheric pressure is so low that you shouldn’t hope to find any water there. How are they going to build living quarters if there is nothing to build with in that red barren wasteland? That’s a problem. Putting rocket boosters on a bunch of mobile homes is not going to work. That is where 3D printing and 3D laser scanning services come into play. NASA plans to print it when they get there. That’s right, they are going to use 3D printing to print out the material to build living quarters.
Earth to NASA
How exactly are they going to pull off this feat anyway? The answer to that is 3D printing robots. Although there are a lot of martian hurdles that need to jumped, the good thing is that there is not much gravity so jumping will be easy. NASA scientists are looking to find ways to utilize Martian soil as building material. Once they get that figured out, they will blast robots to do the setup work. The robots will get busy building roads, pads for landing, walls for living quarters, and what ever else they can do to get a lot of the infrastructure in place before the new occupants arrive. They are putting to good use the 3D printing and 3D laser scanning services that can make this possible.
It is not clear exactly when NASA will be able to get a group of people to start living on Mars. Some estimate that they will be there as early as 2024. That seems a little early to me, but the way technology is advancing these day, they just might prove me wrong. Whatever the case, there is one thing that I can tell you for sure. That is that I am not going to volunteer to go. I need my Chic-fil-a no matter what 3D printing and 3D laser scanning services can do.
