3D printing company ICON has been awarded funding by NASA to develop lunar surface construction systems. The $57.2 million contract was awarded under NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program and will see ICON develop “space-based construction technology” with the aim of creating humanity’s “first-ever construction on another planetary body.”

The technology system, which ICON names Olympus, seeks to primarily use local Lunar and Martian resources as building materials. As part of this, the company plans on using lunar regolith samples brought back from the Apollo missions as well as regolith replicas to further understand their mechanical behavior. ICON’s hardware and software will also be tested in a lunar gravity simulation flight to study their potential performance beyond Earth.

If successful, the system may be used to create critical infrastructure on the Moon, including landing pads, blast shields, and roads. The ultimate goal of the process, according to ICON, is to realize a sustainable lunar economy, including long-term lunar habitation, and to make humanity a “spacefaring civilization.”

“To change the space exploration paradigm from ‘there and back again’ to ‘there to stay,’ we’re going to need robust, resilient, and broadly capable systems that can use the local resources of the Moon and other planetary bodies,” said Jason Ballard, ICON co-founder and CEO upon news of the funding. “We’re pleased that our research and engineering to date has demonstrated that such systems are indeed possible, and we look forward to now making that possibility a reality. The final deliverable of this contract will be humanity’s first construction on another world, and that is going to be a pretty special achievement.”

The scheme is one of several ICON projects to be recently featured in our editorial. Earlier this month, we covered news that the company's partnership with BIG to construct a 100-home community in Austin had commenced on-site, while in April, we reported on the 3D printing company’s collaboration with the Department of Defense to deliver three residential structures on a military base in El Paso. 

In March, ICON worked with Lake|Flato to deliver a curving 3D printed home in Austin, while back in 2021, the group worked with BIG to develop a 3D printed Mars simulation habitat.