ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot has retrieved the fifth sample produced by the first metal 3D printer ever sent to space, and prepared the machine for its next print run later this year. Adenot is flying ESA’s εpsilon mission aboard the International Space Station, where the printer, a technology demonstrator delivered by ESA in 2024, has now produced five parts in orbit.
The retrieval comes at a moment ESA is using to make a broader point about resupply. Since the start of 2026, six cargo missions have already left the Station after dropping off supplies; at roughly 400 km up, the ISS is still an easy, frequent delivery run. That won’t hold once crews travel farther from Earth, which is why ESA frames the printer’s real purpose as building the case, part by part, for on-demand manufacturing, of spare parts, tools, and eventually biological material, as missions push into deep space.
From a calibration line to a fifth sample
The printer’s path to this point has been incremental. Built by an Airbus-led industrial team, the unit was installed in the ISS’s Columbus module in May 2024 by ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, who sealed its door before print operations, overseen remotely from CNES‘s control centre in France, began.
Rather than the powder-based methods common in ground-based metal additive manufacturing, the 3D printing machine feeds in wire, a design choice that sidesteps the containment risks loose metal powder would pose in microgravity. Inside its sealed enclosure, oxygen is swapped for nitrogen so a high-powered laser can melt the wire feedstock, which reaches temperatures above 1,200°C, without oxidising the metal or endangering the crew.
The device produced a simple 2D calibration track, an S-shaped line, within months of installation, before printing its first full sample by August 2024. Three samples have since travelled back to ESTEC, ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands, where engineers have been examining, cutting and bending them to measure how microgravity affected the print quality, benchmarking the results against reference parts printed on an identical machine on the ground.
Adenot’s task was to extract the fifth sample and ready the printer for its next build. “3D printers are far from being simple gadgets, and I’m delighted to have worked on this European technology demonstration preparing the future of human spaceflight,” she said, crediting the CADMOS User Support Center team that guided her through the procedure. In an earlier timelapse posted after retrieving the fourth sample, Adenot noted that the printer weighs about 180 kg on Earth, mass that doesn’t disappear in orbit, even if its weight does, as she found out wrestling it into position with an electric screwdriver.
The fifth sample now joins its predecessors in ESA’s evaluation pipeline, with engineers set to compare its microstructure and strength against ground-printed references. Adenot has also reconfigured the printer for its next build, due later this year, continuing the demonstrator’s slow accumulation of data on how a metal part actually behaves when it’s grown, layer by layer, in microgravity.
Manufacturing as a strategy for deep-space autonomy
ESA’s metal printer is deliberately framed as a demonstrator, not a finished capability, its job is to expose the limits of on-orbit metal printing so the agency can design better hardware and procedures for both crews and ground controllers before autonomy becomes a necessity rather than a convenience.
ESA isn’t alone in treating additive manufacturing as core infrastructure in space. NASA and Redwire have pursued a parallel track aimed even farther out: the Redwire Regolith Print experiment tested 3D printing with simulated lunar dust aboard the ISS’s Additive Manufacturing Facility, developed with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center specifically to support Artemis-era construction on the Moon.
ESA has run a comparable side project of its own: under Project IMPERIAL, a consortium including OHB, Azimut Space and BEEVERYCREATIVE built a conveyor-belt-fed FFF printer capable of producing parts of theoretically unlimited length, demonstrating a 1.5-metre bar at one of the agency’s manufacturing workshops.
Taken together, these programmes describe the same bet from different angles, that turning raw material, whether metal wire, plastic filament, or planetary dust, into usable hardware on site is what makes a crewed mission beyond Earth orbit sustainable. ESA’s metal printer supplies the piece of that picture built from wire and a laser. The fifth sample is a small, incremental step toward that larger goal.
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Featured image shows ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot. Photo via ESA.
