Lunar Colony

Imagine that you're stationed at a [lunar:bona] colony, some decades in the future, when your moon monkey wrench breaks. You have two choices: wait for a replacement tool in the [cargo:load] shipment a month away, or just make one on the spot. The do-it-yourself option recently got a boost, when researchers demonstrated the feasibility of 3-D custom parts printing using raw materials available on the [moon:land] . The team, which included researchers from NASA and Washington State University, worked with a 3-D printer that melts powdered feed stock with lasers and then [layers:levels] the melted powder into solid structures. Real lunar regolith is too precious to melt down, so they fed the printer with imitation lunar soil - a close chemical match to the real thing. In the demo, the researchers produced cylinders of various [sizes:length] and reported that the melted regolith was free of cracks. The research appears in the Rapid Prototyping Journal. The printed parts are still a bit rough around the edges, though - they resemble [rusty:decayed] lengths of iron. One of the team members remarked that "It doesn't look fantastic, but you can make something out of it."