Right now it's easy to think of NASA's glory days as being behind it. China and Europe are sending rockets to space stations, private industry is creating space tourism and NASA's space shuttle program has gone the way of the dodo. Even the Kepler Space Telescope is slowly, but surely, going down in flames.
Yet all is not lost for the ailing U.S. space agency. Quietly, in a lab just to the north of Seattle, NASA and its partner Tethers Unlimited are working on something stupendous. For a good long while, rumors and whispers have made the news concerning NASA's testing of how 3D printing might work in zero gravity. Now we know why: NASA is planning to construct the spacecraft of tomorrow with multi-armed robotic, 3D printing spiders.
The robots are called SpiderFab and are designed to be capable of ...
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