Skip to main content

Cosmonauts launch 3D-printed satellite from the International Space Station

3D printed satellite
NASA
Around the globe, 3D printing is changing manufacturing as we know it and it looks like this innovation is by no means limited to our planet. On Thursday, a pair of cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station launched the world’s first satellite made almost wholly out of 3D-printed components.

It is ungodly expensive to launch items to space. In fact, it costs about $10,000 per pound to launch an object into orbit. Consequently, NASA has been exploring 3D printing to minimize costs. The agency, in partnership with the company Made In Space, has 3D printed an array of tools to use onboard the ISS.

To avoid the harsh vacuum of space, these materials have been predominantly used inside of the space station. However, Thursday, Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy released five nanosatellites as part of larger extravehicular activity mission. The first of which had an exterior casing made with a 3D printer at Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University. It is important to note that the 3D-printed satellite contains traditional internal electronics.

This launch is part of a larger effort to better understand the how 3D-printed components weather the vacuum of space. Highly reminiscent of the Voyager Golden Record, the 3D-printed satellite also contains greetings in a host of languages from around the globe. The small satellites (each is less than two feet in size) are expected to orbit the Earth for about six months. One of the satellites celebrates the 60th anniversary of Sputnik 1, the world’s first successful satellite while another commemorates the 160th birthday of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is considered the father of Russian rocketry.

As part of the satellite launches, the two Russian astronauts spent nearly eight hours outside of the space station. This was substantially longer than the planned six-hour spacewalk. This mission included collecting other experiments outside of the ISS and also wiping residue from the exterior for analysis.

“We will have actually some grounds to get drunk today, I think,” joked one of the cosmonauts.

Currently, the cosmonauts share the space station with three Americans and an Italian. You ever hear the one where a pair of cosmonauts, three American astronauts, and an Italian walk into a space bar?

Dallon Adams
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Dallon Adams is a graduate of the University of Louisville and currently lives in Portland, OR. In his free time, Dallon…
AMD teases performance of its revolutionary 3D V-cache chip
AMD CEO holding 3D V-Cache CPU.

AMD is currently readying its new Ryzen 7 5800X3D, featuring a 3D V-cache, and it looks like we may soon have a powerful processor on our hands. AMD has teased that we can expect an up to 15% performance boost over the base Ryzen 7 5800X.

The tech giant talked about the new chip during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSSC) and revealed more information about its architecture. While the Ryzen 7 5800X3D will certainly be an improvement, will it be enough to compete with Intel's best processors?

Read more
Fighting football injuries with 3D-printed, hyper-personalized pads
The Protect3d 3D scanning process.

If you’ve ever watched a movie about sports, you’ve seen it. It's that moment that occurs two-thirds of the way into the story, when the protagonists’ inevitable victory suddenly seems a lot less certain. Maybe the inspirational mentor winds up in the ER, muttering motivational slogans from a hospital bed. Perhaps the unorthodox coach wins over the team, only to be fired by management for thinking too far outside the box. Possibly the star lacrosse player has a crisis of faith and realizes he wants to be an acapella singer rather than a jock.

For the three co-founders of Protect3D, a real-life version of that moment took place between the second and fifth game of Duke University's football season several years ago, back when the company's founders were engineering students. The team’s starting quarterback was the recipient of a particularly tough sack during a game. He went down hard, and stayed down. Things looked bleak.

Read more
AMD’s 3D-stacked Ryzen 7 5800X3D is ‘world’s fastest gaming processor’
AMD CEO presenting new CPU.

The first processor to use a 3D V-Cache technology was announced at the big AMD CES 2022 keynote. The tech was first announced at Computex 2021, and fans have been eagerly awaiting a processor that will put it to use.

That processor is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which seems like a strange place to start a new range of processors. AMD has its Ryzen 9 chips, after all. That's because the new Ryzen 7 can outclass AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X while gaming, despite using the same architecture.

Read more