Getting a biology experiment into space makes headlines; getting one back with cells intact and data uncontaminated is the part that actually takes years to figure out.
Sebastian Feles, technical lead of the Aeromedical FabLab at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), opened his presentation on space additive manufacturing at our AMA: Aerospace, Space, & Defense 2025 online conference with a single data point: a fully 3D printed payload, built from compostable filament on a standard Prusa Research’s desktop 3D printer, had flown aboard a sounding rocket, survived real space conditions, and come back intact. No clean room, no specialised lab.
“This is what we mean by proof, not promises,” he told the audience. “This is how we’re changing the way space hardware is built, tested and flown.”
Our AMA: Aerospace, Space & Defense 2026 online conference returns on July 9th. Register for free today!
The Biological Realities of Deep Space
What he was proving, though, runs deeper than hardware. Space violates the conditions under which life on Earth spent four billion years evolving. “Every cell from protocells to human organs evolved under exactly 1G,” Feles said. Radiation compounds that disruption: the ISS delivers 100 to 250 millisieverts per year, the Moon 400 to 500, and deep space exceeds 1 sievert annually, against a terrestrial baseline of 2.4.
A Mars mission, unshielded, would expose a crew to the equivalent of hundreds of years of Earth-level exposure. Understanding what that does to living systems, Feles argued, is not optional. “For long-term missions, we must solve both microgravity and radiation risks.”
Studying those effects, however, requires access to real microgravity, and real microgravity is scarce. Sounding rockets offer six to eight minutes of clean, low-vibration weightlessness, enough for cells to adapt and for biological processes to unfold in measurable ways, but “space missions are one shot,” Feles said. “Rarely [do] you get a second try.”
That constraint shapes everything about how the hardware has to perform. Any deviation in temperature, gas mix, or humidity stresses cells in ways that contaminate the very effects a researcher is trying to isolate, which means the data coming back is worthless. “Our hardware must maintain strict and stable environments,” he explained. “Only then do we get data we can actually trust.”
That constraint has a temporal dimension too. The science a payload was designed around can shift before it ever flies. “If you spend years building rigid hardware, the science may have moved on before you ever fly it,” Feles said. “Biology and engineering can’t work isolated. They must be connected from start to finish. They must develop together step by step.”
The Mapheus program, which Feles describes as “a bit of rocket anarchy,” is structured around that idea. Key parameters are deregulated by design, giving the lab room to test approaches that would never survive a conventional review process. Every component flown, in PLA, PETG, compostable filament, or SLA resin, has passed mil-spec vibration testing. None have failed.
But keeping that record intact in the field is a different problem. The moment a team arrives at Esrange, the Swedish Space Corporation’s (SSC) launch site near Kiruna where Mapheus flies from, Feles said, “nothing works anymore.” He calls it the Kiruna effect. “Something always breaks. A cable fails, a system refuses to boot. It’s just normal.”
Because the hardware is modular and printed, repairs happen on the spot with basic tools, at minus 40 degrees Celsius if necessary. “Even in the middle of nowhere, we can keep everything running.” Mapheus also permits late access, allowing biological samples to be loaded just 45 minutes before liftoff.
In programs where samples sit in a payload for days before launch, cellular integrity can degrade enough to compromise results entirely. “For biology, that’s a nightmare,” Feles said. “Late access solves that.”
Shaping Hardware to Fit the Science
The MiniFix syringe-based biological fixation system itself is a record of how much a design can change when the constraints are external and the timeline is short. The original experiment, GraviPlux, studied Trichoplax, which Feles described as “the simplest known animal on earth, just a few millimetres wide, as small as a big protozoa, but a true multi-cellular organism. It senses gravity, knows up from down, has a clear top and bottom. That balance of simplicity and complexity makes it perfect for studying which genes switch on under microgravity or hypergravity.”
When the SSC offered a two-unit CubeSat slot, the system had to shrink from four syringes to two. When DLR built a shared module with slots from one to four-and-a-half units, the mounting system changed entirely and the design required its own internal pressure chamber.
When an Australian partner wanted to test duckweed as a Mars food candidate under microgravity, internal lighting had to be integrated. Each time the fix was the same. “No problem,” Feles said, “because the whole system was 3D printed. I edited in days. No expensive moulds, no delays. That’s the power of keeping things modular, simple and flexible.”
The compostable iteration came from a different kind of pressure. After the Japanese space agency flew a wooden satellite and made headlines, Feles’s supervisor, a botanist, asked whether a flown payload could be composted afterward and used to grow tomatoes. Feles sourced Greentech Pro, a cold-compostable filament with sufficient thermal stability for flight, and reworked the design around it. “So after that flight,” he said, “it literally goes back to nature.”
The most compressed demonstration of the whole methodology came from a request made a few months before a Mapheus launch. Colleagues at the DLR Institute for Material Physics had two to three litres of empty payload space after a high-temperature oven failed to arrive for their metal alloy solidification experiment.
They asked whether Feles could fill it with biology. He pulled a 30-year-old aluminium pressure vessel from Space Shuttle mission STS-55 and 3D printed a custom internal insert adapted for neural organoid fixation.
“Instead of forcing the experiment to fit the hardware,” Feles said, “I shaped the hardware to fit the situation. Instead of waiting years for a new module, we used 3D printing to adapt the internals to this ancient pressure pot.” The experiment flew alongside cutting-edge materials research. “That’s the real strength of 3D printing,” he said. “The hardware adapts to the idea and not the other way around.”
What 3D printing does not compress is what comes after the flight. The gap between a recovered payload and interpretable biological data runs, in Feles’s experience, “sometimes it [takes] months, sometimes it’s years, it’s so complicated and so difficult,” he said. The printing addresses the front end of that process, not the back.
What it buys is the freedom to respond to a changed scientific question, a new module standard, or a last-minute gap in someone else’s payload without the lead times that make conventional aerospace hardware development so poorly matched to the pace of biology.
“We can fail faster, learn quicker,” Feles said, “because every idea can take shape layer by layer exactly when and how we need it.”
Register now for AMAA 2026 taking place online on July 9th.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
To stay up to date with the latest 3D printing news, don’t forget to subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn.
Explore the full Future of 3D Printing and Executive Survey series from 3D Printing Industry, featuring perspectives from CEOs, engineers, and industry leaders on the industrialization of additive manufacturing, 3D printing industry trends 2026, qualification, supply chains, and additive manufacturing industry analysis.
Featured image shows Additive Manufacturing Advantage: Aerospace, Space and Defense 2026 banner. Image by 3D Printing Industry.
