Contour Crafting + USC team embarks on a mission to demonstrate technology for colonizing Earth’s moon and beyond

 A team of engineers lead by the University of Southern California startup, Contour Crafting Corporation (founded by VSOE’s own Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis[1]) and USC VSOE’s Professor Lucio Soibelman has been awarded a Phase 1 NASA STTR Project aimed at demonstrating automated technologies for Lunar surface site preparation.  

 Contour Crafting Corporation (CC Corp) will build a special version of their novel material conveyance system, called CrafTram, to assist in point-to-point conveyance of construction materials on the lunar surface. Known solutions such as earth moving equipment consume large amounts of energy, have to travel one way with empty loads, and their bulk makes transporting the machinery to the lunar surface very expensive. The special CrafTram proposed by CC Corp is a super light-weight concept, which folds into a small spatial envelope for ease of transport to the lunar surface, and once on the lunar surface it is self-transformed to its deployed form for autonomous operation at planetary construction sites. 

 Prof. Soibelman at USC VSOE’s Structures and Materials Laboratory (SMRL) will design lunar infrastructure elements to be built with Lunar material. For demonstration, design and construction of berms will be analyzed in detail. One important application of berms on the lunar surface is to protect the environment around the landing pads from blast projectiles produced by spaceships taking off or landing. The combined team of CC Corp and SMRL will demonstrate a scale-down version of the CrafTram concept in action constructing a lunar berm structure out of lunar regolith simulant material.

 Outside of this application, the CrafTram technology is expected to serve as a general-purpose material conveyance system that will be made available for other missions on the moon, and in the future, missions to Mars. Furthermore, it is expected that the technology will have many terrestrial applications.

 The goals of this collaborative effort are directly aligned with NASA’s Artemis mission which aims to establish the first lunar base and a lunar economy in the coming years. CC Corp and USC VSOE are proud to lead these initial steps to enable human colonization of Earth’s moon and beyond. 

More info at www.contourcrafting.com

email: [email protected]

[1] Dr. Khoshnevis has been developing technologies for planetary construction since 2004 under NASA support. His accomplishments in these research and development efforts won him two grand prizes in 2014 and 2016 in international competitions sponsored by NASA.