Materials Research, Advanced Manufacturing, Structures, and Assembly

As NASA embarks on its mission for human exploration of the Moon as a step towards the human mission to Mars, taking full advantage of the potential offered by new and existing technologies will be critical to enabling sustainable Lunar and Mars presence. The Materials Research, Advanced Manufacturing, Structures and Assembly focus area seeks to address challenges such as lowering the cost of exploration, enabling efficient, reliable operations in extreme environments, and accelerating the integration of advanced tools and technologies into next generation structural designs. Improvement in all these areas is critical to future missions. Since this focus area covers a broad area of interests, specific topics and subtopics are chosen to enhance and/or fill gaps in the space and exploration technology development programs, as well as to complement other mission directorate materials, manufacturing, structures, and in-space assembly needs.