The American space agency has great plans for the future, including the prospect of colonizing the Moon and sending astronaut expeditions to the Red Planet. However, all of these ambitious plans are heavily reliant on one thing, and that is the ability to produce things off-world. For example, manufacturing space parts for a spacecraft on the natural satellite may represent the difference between life and death for the astronauts of the mission. Such a device that can replicate other objects by creating exact copies is currently being tested at NASA and will make its way to space soon.

The “replicator” technology has a slightly less bombastic name, and has been dubbed electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3). Essentially, what it does is use energetic electron beams to melt metal, and then construct an object from top to bottom, and layer by layer. Already, the method holds great promise in reducing some of the expenses that the aviation industry has, and may also be employed in research related to the discovery of new materials, Space reports.

According to experts, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) have already expressed their approval of the tool, and are excited about the tantalizing possibilities it brings forth. The station crew could be able to devise some of the equipment and spare parts it needs on its own in the near future, which is a very important capability. This is most obvious when considering the fact that, as the space shuttles retire in 2010, there will be no spacecraft in the world capable of carrying large structures and spare parts to the orbital lab. Having the ability to manufacture the pieces themselves could again mean the difference between life and death for the astronauts.

The innovation was pioneered by experts at the NASA Langley Research Center, in Virginia, who were led by materials research engineer Karen Taminger. Preliminary tests of the new device have already been carried out on the “vomit comet,” a specialized NASA airplane that is capable of descending with such great speed, that it temporarily creates a few seconds of microgravity inside its hull. Taminger is eager to have EBF3 included in NASA's flight manifest, so that it could be delivered to the space station as soon as possible, to begin testing.

“They get up there, and all they have is time and imagination,” she says of ISS astronauts. “We can change the composition on the fly. You can add alloys of different chemistries and then adjust the speed that you feed the wires, and that would change the chemistry of the parts we build,” she concludes.