Printed houses, rockets and organs: what 3D printing can do today
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Your printer makes brackets, figures and spare parts. In industry and research, the same basic principle is used to print entirely different things: homes, rockets, bridges and even implants made of living cells. Here are documented examples, each with the year, and an honest assessment of which of them are everyday reality and which are still research.
Houses from the printer
In 3D-printed construction, a large gantry printer travels across the building site and deposits a special concrete or mortar layer by layer, much as your printer does with filament.
Germany’s first printed home is in Beckum in North Rhine-Westphalia. Printing began in 2020, and the house was officially opened on 26 July 2021. It has two storeys and around 160 m² of living space. It was printed by a BOD2 printer from the Danish manufacturer COBOD, carried out by the company PERI. The printer needed about five minutes per square metre of double-skin wall. The state of NRW funded the project with almost €200,000.
An important point for context: mainly the walls are printed. The foundations, roof, windows and building services are still built in the conventional way.
Space and aviation
Here, 3D printing is long past being a gimmick and is series production. Printing is mostly done from metal powder, which a laser fuses layer by layer.
- GE fuel nozzle (from 2015): For the LEAP aircraft engine, GE prints a fuel nozzle as a single part that used to consist of 20 welded individual parts. According to GE, it is 25 % lighter and five times more durable. By October 2018, more than 30,000 had been printed.
- SpaceX SuperDraco (2014): The combustion chamber of the SuperDraco engine for the Dragon 2 space capsule is printed from the nickel alloy Inconel. By July 2014, the printed combustion chamber had run more than 80 times in testing.
- Relativity Space Terran 1 (2023): On 22 March 2023, the Terran 1 rocket launched, about 85 % of whose mass consisted of printed parts. It survived the launch and stage separation but did not reach orbit. The flight nevertheless showed that a largely printed rocket withstands the loads of launch.
Medicine
Prostheses and implants
Implants from the printer have arrived in medicine. One well-known early example: in 2011, an 83-year-old patient in the Netherlands received a complete lower jaw made of titanium, printed by the Belgian company LayerWise. Guinness lists it as the first printed complete lower jaw. According to the report, the woman was able to speak and swallow again one day after the operation.
The big advantage: a printed implant can be adapted exactly to a person’s anatomy, based on CT data.
Bioprinting: ears yes, organs not yet
In bioprinting, you do not print with plastic or metal but with a “bio-ink” containing living cells. In March 2022, a 20-year-old woman in the USA received an ear implant printed from her own cartilage cells. She had been born with a malformation of the ear (microtia). The implant, called AuriNovo, comes from the company 3DBio Therapeutics and is being studied in a clinical trial with eleven patients. How well such implants last in the long term is therefore still open.
Whole organs such as kidney, liver or heart, on the other hand, cannot yet be printed and transplanted. The biggest hurdle is the blood vessels: an organ needs a finely branched network from large arteries down to tiny capillaries, otherwise the cells inside die. The researcher Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine describes exactly this problem as what research has been working on for decades. Headlines about “printed organs” usually mean small pieces of tissue in the laboratory.
Food
Food can be printed too. In September 2023, the first printed food reached a supermarket: the Austrian start-up Revo Foods launched a vegan salmon alternative in Vienna. It consists of mycoprotein (from fungi), pea protein and algae, among other things. Printing ensures that the layers resemble the fibrous structure of fish.
Bridges
On 15 July 2021, Queen Máxima opened a pedestrian bridge made of printed stainless steel in Amsterdam. The bridge by the company MX3D is about 12 metres long and spans the canal Oudezijds Achterburgwal. It was printed by industrial robots that weld metal on layer by layer. The project began in 2015, and the opening was originally planned for 2017. The bridge contains sensors that measure load and condition. The data feeds into a digital model of the bridge, a so-called digital twin.
Fashion and shoes
In April 2017, Adidas presented the Futurecraft 4D. The midsole is made by 3D printing using the Digital Light Synthesis process from the company Carbon, a resin printing process. The advantage: the sole can be firmer in some places than in others. Adidas planned 5,000 pairs for 2017 and over 100,000 pairs by the end of 2018. The upper is still stitched in the traditional way.
What this means for you
Most of these examples use processes that share only the basic principle with your home printer: layer by layer. Materials, machines and prices are completely different. Even so, every example shows the same thing: 3D printing pays off where shapes are needed that are individual, complex or in small quantities. That applies equally to your spare part at home. Which processes exist is explained in What is 3D printing?.
Next: 3D printing records and 7 myths about 3D printing.