Additive manufacturing for a Moon village

The European Space Agency has proposed a Moon Village as the next step in the human exploration of the Solar System. Considering the cost of sending mass to the lunar surface, the utilization of in-situ resources for building the lunar base is a suitable option to make this mission affordable. Additive manufacturing can play an important role in this context. This paper reviews the state of the art and provides a detailed trade-off of available additive manufacturing technologies that can be used in this mission. Each technology is analyzed in terms of its suitability, its expected performance and the possible required modifications. Accordingly, powder bed fusion has been preliminarily selected. In addition, a test is designed to assess the viability of the chosen option. This work constitutes a first stage for defining an integral system solution to fulfill efficiently all the established requirements. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.