After several years of lab-testing ideas for orbital manufacturing technology, the US Department of Defense’s research arm has decided to head into orbit for the latest round of experiments.
DARPA’s Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program kicked off in 2022 with the aim of developing methods to ship raw materials to orbit for manufacturing in space. According to the program’s manager, Andrew Detor, the first two phases of the project went so swimmingly that additional laboratory time isn’t needed.
“Originally, Phase 3 was going to be about making things more precisely in the lab than we did in Phase 2,” Detor explained. “But we said, ‘You know, the maturity is there, and there would be more impact if we took the capabilities we have now and actually go demonstrate them in space to show that it can be done’.”
The materials scientist said performing in space means it’s researchers can’t sweep challenges under the rug as they might do in a lab.
There are two projects that’ll be tested in orbit for NOM4D phase 3 in 2026, one conducted by the California Institute of Technology, and the other by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The pair were involved in the project in both of the previous phases and both “have demonstrated tremendous advances” in their work so far, Detor said.
Caltech’s project will see it hitching a ride with space manufacturing startup Momentus, which has been involved with NOM4D since last year.
Momentus’ role in NOM4D phase 3 will see it shuttling Caltech’s composite fiber longeron-assembling robot to orbit onboard its Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle. Once in place, Caltech’s machine will operate without human engagement to construct a 1.4-meter diameter circular truss akin to the structure of an antenna aperture. If successful, it would be the first step scaling up towards building large-scale structures in space, Detor said.
The University of Illinois, meanwhile, will be hitching a ride on NASA’s Commercial Resupply Mission NG-24, currently scheduled for April, 2026, to the International Space Station. The Illinois team’s experiment will be conducted in the ISS’ Bishop Airlock module, and will experiment with a way to polymerize flat carbon fiber tubes into stable structures without the need to superheat them in an autoclave.
A rendering of University of Illinois’ NOM4D project in space – click to enlarge
“If you want to construct a large structure in space, you don’t have a 100-meter autoclave you can put something into to heat it,” Detor said. “So, they’ve developed what’s called a ‘frontal polymerization’ method, where you just ignite one end of the inside of the tube and the reaction self-propagates, stiffening the carbon tubes without heating up the whole structure.”
Unlike the large-scale Caltech demonstration, Illinois’ team will be constrained by the size of the airlock module. A DARPA spokesperson told The Register the current plan is to manufacture polymerized tubes a little more than half a meter in length and 50 millimeters in diameter to be sent back to Earth, but the team is still discussing how large it could go without space becoming an issue.
A third team involved in NOM4D phase 3 from the University of Florida is working to bend metal with lasers, but they’re not going to be testing their project in space just yet, as DARPA told us the team still has to “de-risk” its tech.
If phase 3 of NOM4D is successful, Detor said the next step would be scaling the tech for practical purposes, for example constructing 100-meter or larger space-based RF antennas to improve awareness of activity to the Moon and beyond, or building additional structures in orbit to support the burgeoning space economy.
“We can also envision NOM4D technologies enabling other massive structures in orbit, such as refueling stations for commercial or government spacecraft, spaced-based solar array farms, and many other commercial and national security applications,” Detor said. Whether future projects could include fabricating entire spacecraft in orbit to free them of the constraints of terrestrial launch isn’t part of NOM4D’s scope, unfortunately, so no Star Trek shipyards quite yet.
“The primary goal is to enable the construction of large structures in space that would be difficult to pack and then subsequently unfurl in space,” a DARPA spokesperson told us. “The suite of options for what you could build is nearly limitless,” the spokesperson added, but didn’t mention whether that would include space-faring vessels.
First things first, of course: Let’s be sure the experiments actually work as well in the cold, harsh vacuum of space as they did in Earth’s atmosphere – we’ll have to wait until next year to see how that turns out. ®
