NASA to send 3D printer to space

[d.o.g.]

How will this impact companies dealing with plastic moulding industry? This seems like a game-changer.

Once there is mass adoption, and costs come down, some existing industries will be seriously threatened.

3-D printing was first made commercially available in 1986, and the general public could buy machines in 1988. That's 27 (25) years now. It still hasn't taken over the world, because "traditional" manufacturing methods still have important advantages like speed. There's a history of 3-D printing here:

http://www.3ders.org/3d-printing/3d-prin...story.html

For items with simple shapes, 3-D printing incurs a massive speed penalty. Plastic injection molding production cycles are measured in seconds per unit, 3-D printing cycles are measured in hours. No way 3-D printing can compete in making things like combs, toothbrushes, computer key boards, plastic smartphone casings etc. That's why, when reporters use 3-D printers to make plastic figurines and proclaim "this sucks" when it takes all night to make one 3-inch tall figure, they are missing the point. For this type of product, plastic injection molding wins hands-down.

But 3-D printing can make sense when quantities are limited e.g. one-off prototypes, replacements for out-of-production parts etc. In such cases, the fixed cost and time of making the metal mould is too high to be offset by the lower per-unit cost and lower per-unit production time. For such applications 3-D printing has already been adopted, in fact it has been in widespread use in prototyping over 10 years now. There are even listed companies such as 3-D Systems, Stratasys and ExOne.

The New York Times has a sensible article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/techno...-like.html

I personally found it quite amusing that the local Singapore papers made a big hoo-hah about a local startup raising money to build an "affordable" 3-D printer, when you can already buy one for under US$400. By the time that local startup comes to market in 1-2 years' time, their machine may well be obsolete and too expensive. FWIW some guy recently built a 3-D printer from Lego parts, so these things are very far from rocket science these days. As for the PM himself talking about 3-D printing - his speechwriters are clearly way behind the curve on the technology.

As usual, YMMV.