Overview
Establishment of an outpost on the moon is a cornerstone of the U.S. Space Exploration Policy. This lunar outpost will eventually provide the necessary planning, technology development, testbed, and training for manned missions in the future beyond the Moon. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is investigating how the in situ resources can be utilized to improve mission success by reducing up-mass, improving safety, reducing risk, and bringing down costs for the overall mission.
An infrastructure capable of fabrication and non-destructive evaluation will be needed to support habitat structure development and maintenance, tools and mechanical parts fabrication, as well as repair and replacement of space-mission hardware such as life-support items, vehicle components, and crew systems. This infrastructure will utilize the technologies being developed under the In Situ Fabrication and Repair (ISFR) element, which is working in conjunction with the technologies being developed under the In Situ Resources Utilization (ISRU) element, to live off the land. The ISFR Element supports the Space Exploration Initiative by reducing downtime due to failed components; decreasing risk to crew by recovering quickly from degraded operation of equipment; improving system functionality with advanced geometry capabilities; and enhancing mission safety by reducing assembly part counts of original designs where possible.
Importance to Exploration The U.S. Space Exploration Policy explicitly makes mention of utilizing the resources of the Moon and the planets beyond. It was recognized by NASA early in the planning of the new lunar architecture that, if humans were to inhabit spaces far removed from earth for extended times, new approaches would have to be developed to conquer the old problems of keeping hardware operational through an adequate supply of spare parts. Rather than transporting from Earth a full spectrum of all the replacement parts that might reasonably be needed by a lunar base, one approach studied was to manufacture the parts locally (i.e., in situ). Thus, only the mass of adequate raw materials for parts fabrication, and the machinery to do so, would need to be transported, rather than a full catalog of replacement parts. Better yet, if the raw materials could be provided locally, then that needed up-mass could be eliminated as well. Thus, the desires for an in situ fabrication capability converged with the need for an in situ resource utilization capability.
As part of the investigation into the requirements for such a fabrication capability, it was recognized that other complementary and supporting capabilities and technologies would have to be developed. Among these, it was recognized that as a natural follow-on it would be necessary to adequately verify the parts that are built in situ. A method of inspecting and analyzing the as-built part would be needed, and preferably a method that would not require any type of destructive testing or degradation of the part. Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques would therefore be needed; as an added benefit, these same NDE techniques would be capable of aiding in preventative maintenance and of detecting flaws and other problems in structures that had been brought from Earth.
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