3D Printing On Mars With Dirt!
Written by Charlie of Tool Camp
Last year on Mars I tested out a prototype for a large, dirt-house printer. This isn’t a new technology. Concrete 3D printers have been around for awhile and there are already big companies printing suburbs out of concrete in Texas and Arizona. Printing out of clay based material isn’t new either. Wasp, a company based in Italy, has been printing some large scale structures since 2015. Artist Ron Rael has been creating complex 3D printed sculptures and installations out of adobe in the US for awhile as well.
I had been working as a builder (mostly on strawbale / affordable housing made of cob) and as a natural plasterer and was very inspired by the potential of this technology! Clay is an incredible building material - it’s cheap, locally available in almost any part of the world, and has a very low carbon footprint. Clay has all sorts of properties that make it seriously competitive with the most advanced modern building materials and house membranes. The problem, as any one who has worked on an earthen home before will tell you, is that it is EXTREMELY labor intensive. Any cost saved by having a cheap material gets lost quickly in hours of labor spent building the home. As a result, earthen homes often are built by people with lots of money or lots of time and rarely are a practical solution for the average home build.
This is why 3D printing became such an inspiring option for me! But as I started to look into acquiring a house printer for myself I encountered another problem. Most of the companies making these large concrete 3D printers were not aspiring towards affordability or accessibility. Their ideal clients were large housing developers who are able to pay upward of $1,000,000 for a single machine to print an entire neighborhood.
Wasp has a beautiful printer that they are trying to make accessible but the base price is still over $160,000. Ron Rael is a professor at Berkeley and is able to rely on research grants for printers that cost well over $100,000. These are all far outside of an average consumer’s price range. With that in consideration, I began to realize that in order to play around with what these machines can do, explore better materials than concrete, and develop truly affordable building methods, I’d have to build my own 3-D printer. So in 2023, I began this project. I spent the winter experimenting and seeing how low I could get the base cost of a house sized 3D printer.
I have always been inspired by the open source approach to DIY industrial machines done by organizations like Precious Plastics. They found ways to use easily purchasable components and stock steel as the building blocks for otherwise complex, expensive and proprietary machines.
3D printing has always been a very open source movement. There are many free softwares and instructional videos on how to set up a simple XYZ axis printer. Most of these programs don’t care if the 3D printer you are building is 12” or 12’. I just went for the simplest. For the prototype I was able to pick up a beat-up concrete pump that had been used for spraying shotcrete in Texas. These are the same pumps used for 3D printing concrete, but regularly pop up on industrial machinery auctions. I hope to make a DIY, opensourceable version of a functioning concrete-pump next summer.
After making all the components over the summer of 2024, I assembled the printer for the first time on Mars this year.
For some of the first components, I used angle iron and steel square tubing. These materials are much cheaper than the aluminum spaceframes used by many of these other companies. It is easy to weld, cut and replace and accessible almost anywhere in the world. Bike chains and sprockets are sturdy and intuitive ways to move things along tracks with easily orderable parts.
With the help of some more tech-savy martians, I got the software worked out and the tracks moving. The machine was properly running by the end of Mars and had time for two small prints by the end of the season. There isn’t much in the Salton Sea area, but there is a ton of clay and sand, perfect for building. I had been worried that dialing in the mix would be tricky but it was surprisingly forgiving and intuitive.
There was a lot of learning and trouble-shooting! Over the summer of 2025, I have rebuilt and designed parts of the 3D printer for version 2.0 and I am excited to hit the ground running this year on Mars and see what this machine is capable of. Maybe make some small houses or structures.
I also will be using the time to compile the information and documentation to open source the whole design so others can start messing around and improving it too. I will definitely need help so apply and reach out if this is something you would like to be a part of!