Robot successfully builds space structure in first autonomous construction demo

A robotic truss builder that was conceived, designed and built by Caltech researchers has successfully built a structure in space—without the help of astronauts—for the first time. The truss builder, part of DARPA’s Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program, consists of an autonomous manipulator that picks up struts and joints held in nearby dispensers to repeatedly assemble identical sections, or bays, of a perimeter truss.

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For maintenance, a continuous rail would be handy to have.

Building in power, comms and diagnostics would be handy too.

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Robot successfully builds space structure in first autonomous construction demo

Asteroid mining will crash the platinum market, but that’s good news for Earth

Science fiction authors have been dreaming of robotic spacecraft harvesting fortunes from asteroids for decades. Humanity is slowly getting closer to that reality. But if you ask asteroid mining skeptics, they will usually ask one specific question—what happens to the prices of all those rare materials once someone actually brings them back? A pair of system dynamicists from MIT directly tackled that question with a new paper titled Will AstroForge Collapse the PGM Market?

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Asteroid Mining Industry Structure: Targets, Tech and What Is Proven

Asteroid mining is usually described as a single business: send a spacecraft, grab a metal-rich rock and bring home the platinum. In practice it is a chain of separate activities (finding, reaching, extracting, processing and delivering), and each link sits at a very different stage of development.

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