If the United States is to return to the moon for a prolonged period of time, then supplies will need to be created at the lunar surface. It would be seriously expensive to take all of the material to the moon, so this is where 3D printing could come in, allowing astronauts to construct whatever their lunar colony needed from raw materials. Much of the excitement around 3D printing in space has focused on using it to construct buildings from lunar rock.
3D printing also has the added benefit of working with minimal human involvement. You can just set it to print and wait for the finished product. This means it can even be operated remotely. In theory, you could send a 3D printer to the moon (or any other space destination) ahead of a human crew and it could start manufacturing structures before the astronauts even arrived. The moon is covered in regolith, a loose, powdery material formed from millions of years of meteors bombarding the moon’s surface. This has slowly transformed the top layers of bedrock into a soil-like material made from grains less than a few millimetres across. This material could be used as the material to use in a 3D printer.
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Credits:
https://www.space.com/return-to-the-moon-3d-printing-with-moondust.html
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