Where Next, Columbus?

摘要

In the final days of 2014, a small group of under 30-year-olds in Mountain View, California, changed the way space exploration will be done forever. Behind closed doors, in a small mission operations room at NASA Research Park at historic Moffett Field, my colleagues and I at Made In Space emailed the first instructions to a 3-D printer on the International Space Station - commanding the printer to begin manufacturing the first object that our species has built off Earth. This begins a new history in our ability to imagine, design, manufacture, develop and live in space. What used to take millions of dollars, thousands of employees, a huge supply chain and a launch complex can now be done with a computer and a handful of people. We can now virtually launch goods to space.