Exploring a New Model for Future Space Missions
What happens when students and researchers on opposite sides of the world work together to operate a simulated lunar habitat?
In a recent multinational mission simulation, teams in China and Australia collaborated remotely to test the operation of the UMIC (Underwater Modular Interplanetary Community) Lunar Farm. The project explored how future lunar and Martian settlements might be managed through a combination of life support systems, robotics, and remote mission control.
The experiment formed part of the Space Mission Commons initiative, an effort to investigate how small, distributed research facilities can contribute to a global network of space mission simulations and educational opportunities.​

A Lunar Habitat in the Heart of a City
Most lunar and planetary analogue stations are located in remote deserts, volcanic regions, or polar environments. While these locations provide realistic terrain, they are often expensive to operate and difficult to access.The UMIC Underwater Lunar Farm takes a different approach.
Located within an urban environment in China, the facility is designed to support remote access and operation while simulating key aspects of a future extraterrestrial habitat. At its core is an intelligent biosphere system intended to explore how self-sustaining communities might function beyond Earth.
The project focuses on three primary research areas:

• Collaboration between life support systems and remote mission teams
• Distributed mission command and control
• Community-scale operational models for future space habitats

Inside the UMIC Lunar Farm
The facility is surrounded by approximately 800 litres of water and incorporates several interconnected systems designed to simulate aspects of a lunar settlement.
These include:

• A plant cultivation chamber designed to emulate a controlled life support environment
• A robotic patrol corridor
• Human living and working spaces

Together, these components support research into autonomous biosphere operations, robotic control strategies, and human factors in environments where communication delays and remote supervision play important roles.
Unlike traditional analogue habitats, UMIC's urban location allows researchers and students to participate remotely, creating opportunities for international collaboration without requiring travel to isolated locations.​

Cardiovascular diseases remain one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, demanding diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that are not only accurate but also personalised. As healthcare shifts toward precision medicine, aptamer-based technologies are emerging as powerful tools with the potential to revolutionise how cardiac diseases are detected, monitored, and treated.

​Aptamers, short single-stranded DNA or RNA molecules, are engineered to bind specific targets such as proteins, cells, or biomarkers with high affinity and selectivity. Often described as synthetic alternatives to antibodies, aptamers offer several advantages, including low immunogenicity, high stability, cost-effective synthesis, and ease of chemical modification. These features make them particularly suitable for integration into next-generation diagnostic and therapeutic platforms.

In the context of cardiac diseases, early detection is critical. Conditions such as myocardial infarction, heart failure, and atherosclerosis rely on timely identification of biomarkers like troponins, C-reactive protein (CRP), and B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP). Aptamer-based biosensors enable highly sensitive and rapid detection of these biomarkers, even at very low concentrations, offering the potential for earlier diagnosis compared with some conventional approaches. When integrated with portable platforms such as paper-based assays or smartphone-assisted devices, these systems can deliver point-of-care diagnostics, reducing the need for centralised laboratory infrastructure. These innovations maybe particularly valuable in remote or resource-constrained environments, including spaceflight medicine, where rapid point-of-care cardiovascular monitoring is essential.

​Beyond diagnostics, aptamers are also gaining attention in targeted therapy. Their ability to specifically bind disease-related molecules allows them to act as drug delivery agents or therapeutic inhibitors. Although not a cardiovascular therapy, Pegaptanib, an RNA-based aptamer approved by the FDA in 2004, demonstrates the therapeutic viability of aptamer technologies and supports exploration of similar cardiovascular applications. For example, aptamers may be designed to block clot formation pathways or target inflammatory mediators involved in cardiovascular disease progression.

That tension is exactly what motivated our recent study, published in Acta Astronautica. Rather than asking only what additive manufacturing can technically do, we asked a broader and perhaps more important question: what actually enables or constrains its adoption within spacecraft organisations?

​In many public discussions, additive manufacturing is framed as an inevitable next step for aerospace and space production. But in reality, the transition is more complex. Space is a high-stakes sector. Components must meet extremely demanding standards, qualification processes are rigorous, and the cost of failure is exceptionally high. Under these conditions, even highly promising technologies face barriers that go beyond engineering performance.

​Our study explores these barriers and drivers in a structured way. It shows that implementation depends on the interaction of three broad dimensions: technological characteristics, organisational readiness, and environmental pressures. In other words, even when additive manufacturing offers clear technical advantages, adoption may stall if organisations do not yet have the right skills, culture, processes, validation pathways, or strategic alignment to support it. Likewise, external pressures such as supply-chain demands, industrial competition, regulatory expectations, and ecosystem maturity also shape whether AM moves from experimentation to routine use.

This matters because it shifts the conversation. The question is no longer simply whether additive manufacturing is useful for spacecraft production, but how it can be usable, scalable and trusted. This approach highlights that adoption is also about organisational capability, industrial context, and the ability to connect technical potential with the realities of spacecraft development. In that sense, the challenge is not only to improve additive manufacturing, but also to understand what space-sector requirements need to be met for additive manufacturing to become part of everyday practice in the space sector.

​This is perhaps the key message of our work. If additive manufacturing is to truly “lift off” in spacecraft production, the challenge is not only to improve the technology, but also to prepare the organisations that will use it. The future of space manufacturing will not be shaped by technical capability alone. It will be shaped by the alignment between innovation potential and the organisational capacity to absorb, validate and deploy it.

​And that may be where the real transformation begins.