AI SpaceFactory

AI SpaceFactory won NASA's 3D-printed habitat challenge in 2019, printing a fifteen-foot Mars habitat prototype called MARSHA from a basalt-fiber polymer designed to be shredded and printed again. David Malott, an architect who had spent his career designing supertall towers, founded the company in 2017 to take construction printing to the Moon and Mars, and to bring what it learned back to Earth.

Since the prize, the plan has run through Earth: sell construction printers, the ASTRA robotic-arm machine and the Starforge gantry machine, and let terrestrial revenue fund the off-world ambition. The materials research continues with NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which has printed with lunar simulant in vacuum at minus 200 degrees Celsius, and there is a lunar outpost design, LINA, on the books.

The gap between prizes and buildings has not closed. TERA, a crowdfunded Earth habitat announced after the NASA win, was never completed. A 2023 partnership with Turner Construction was meant to put the printers on a real project within the year, and no completed project has been reported since. No printer customer has been named, recent news is nearly all self-published, and seven years after the prize there is still no finished structure, on Earth or off it.