Name: This Little-Known Lab Is Changing the Future of Space
Uploaded: 2020-04-13T16:55:47.000Z
Duration: 6 min 20 s
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In 2019, NASA announced they were working to go back to the Moon,

Except... to live on the Moon, we'll need to do things we've never done before

and overcome challenges we've never faced.

And to do that, we'll need some brand-new technology.

Luckily for us, NASA has a place right here on Earth,

in the marshes of Florida where they're preparing for that future.

Because even though Swamp Works is part of a government organization,

they have an extremely collaborative approach.

So ideas can be developed, tested, and improved on quickly.

Swamp Works's main goal is to develop tech that will support astronauts

on long missions to the Moon and, eventually, Mars.

And since they were established in 2013, they've made a lot of progress.

Swamp Works follows the ethos of the Skunk Works innovation lab at Lockheed Martin,

The work there gave rise to some of the most-effective stealth and recon aircraft,

And NASA is hoping to achieve the same kind of innovation and success.

At first glance, this place looks like a Disneyland for engineers.

It's packed with cool tech, exciting projects, and the best sandbox you've ever seen.

Seriously. Swamp Works has a massive, climate-controlled testbed of synthetic lunar soil,

It helps teams quickly design, build, test, and improve prototypes,

and it lets them immediately see what works in real-world settings.

One project that's benefited from this is RASSOR,

or the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot.

It's designed to help tackle one of the biggest challenges in space exploration:

the fact that shipping stuff is expensive.

These days, to send one kilogram to the Moon's surface, it costs around a million dollars.

So packing things like machinery and building materials

would add up to making long missions prohibitively expensive.

One possible solution is not to take these things,

but to make them using dust, or regolith, from the lunar surface.

A lot of scientists have thrown around this idea, but Swamp Works is trying to make it a reality.

Until now, rovers have mainly been scientific samplers,

only able to collect small amounts of rock and soil.

They haven't been made to do serious digging on extraterrestrial surfaces.

But RASSOR will. This isn't as simple as it sounds, though.

You can't just send a backhoe to the Moon and call it a day.

The lower gravity there means everything has a lower weight,

so construction equipment has lower traction.

Also, whatever you're digging is more likely to go flying around all over the place.

RASSOR gets around this by using two sets of toothed drums as digging buckets.

These drums rotate in opposite directions,

so they cancel out any horizontal forces the robot generates while digging.

They also allow RASSOR to dig, store, and transport

about 90 kilograms of regolith at one time.

So far, tests on RASSOR prototypes are going well.

The next steps are to test them in lower gravity,

to see how they fare digging regolith and ice of different consistencies.

So someday, this robot could be carrying huge amounts of regolith

across the Moon or even Mars, helping us collect the materials we need.

there are other challenges to overcome on the Moon, like dealing with the dust itself.

It's electrostatically charged, too, like a balloon rubbed on a sweater,

And! Since it's made of crushed volcanic rock, it's very abrasive,

In fact, dust was responsible for many problems on the Apollo missions,

from inaccurate sensor readings to imperfect seals.

So Swamp Works is developing a dust shield like nothing we've ever seen before.

It's called an electrodynamic dust shield, or EDS for short.

It uses transparent electrodes to run a weak electric current

The wave pushes the dust away, stopping it from sticking.

And tests have also shown that switching it on, on an already dusty surface,

Swamp Works scientists envision EDS being used

on visors, windows, solar panels, instruments, and even spacesuits.

The prototype was sent to the International Space Station for a year of testing in April 2019,

so at the time we're filming this video, we don't yet have final results.

But if all goes well, the next step will be to integrate EDS into robots like RASSOR

and other tech that will be exposed to lunar dust.

So, let's say you've got a digging robot and a way to keep your equipment free from lunar dust.

Now, you just have to figure out how to build stuff.

And Swamp Works is investigating that, too.

They're developing what they call the Zero Launch Mass 3-D Print Head,

which will be able to build entire structures from scratch,

without any materials shipped from Earth.

The print head takes volcanic material from regolith

and combines it with a custom polymer to make a sticky concrete.

Then, once it's given instructions, it can 3-D print materials like similar printers on Earth.

So far, Swamp Works has used simulated lunar regolith to build beams and domes.

But there's still plenty of work to do, like refining the concrete's consistency,