Exoforge · Section
Exoforge: industry beyond Earth
Building a settlement means building the factories to supply it. Exoforge covers making things off Earth: factories that run themselves, machines that build machines, and what could be made from lunar soil and Martian air.
Colonization.siUpdated 8 October 20263 explainers
More than 3D printing in space
Most coverage of "space manufacturing" means a printer on the International Space Station or a capsule growing crystals in orbit. Those are real and they matter. But a settlement needs a whole chain behind it: something has to dig up raw material, extract oxygen, water and metal from it, turn that into parts, and assemble the parts into machines and power systems. Ideally some of those machines go on to build more of the chain.
Exoforge follows that whole chain. We think of it as extraterrestrial industrialization: an industrial ecosystem that works beyond Earth, using local materials wherever it can.
Why now
For decades this was a topic for studies and conference papers. Several things changed in the last two years:
- NASA is paying for prototypes. On 8 September 2026, NASA issued the final solicitation for its Lunar Enabling Infrastructure Accelerator (LEIA). It funds prototypes in five areas: vertical solar arrays, oxygen production from lunar soil, radioisotope power generators, in-space manufacturing and nanomaterials. Proposals were due on 8 October 2026 after an extension.
- Factories have started flying. ESA's metal 3D printer finished the first metal part made on the ISS in August 2024. Varda Space Industries has brought several of its orbital manufacturing capsules back to Earth since 2024. Space Forge's ForgeStar-1 satellite switched on its furnace in orbit in December 2025.
- Oxygen from rock and air has been shown to work. NASA's MOXIE instrument made 122 grams of oxygen from Martian air between 2021 and 2023. In February 2026, a NASA team used concentrated sunlight to pull oxygen out of simulated lunar soil.
None of this is an industry yet. But it is the first hardware for one, and the explainers below look at what exists, what is still on paper, and what would have to happen next.