ESSA: "The Extraterrestrial Solar Sinter Architecture Project" is a permaculture-inspired, architectural-scale 3D-printer that uses only sun and sand. Each of us were discontent with the colonization of space going to big companies; we saw clean-tech as the solution. "If we're going to colonize, let's DO IT RIGHT!", instead of something that we'd look back on in 500 years with regret. From the be
ginning, we were motivated to make a "green tech" solution to making architecture on other planets. We found Markus Kayser's pivotal "Solar Sinter" and built it bigger, much bigger. But with greater size came slowness, so we automated it. Roboticist Jeremy Whyte was the second founder, adding the self-supplying, self-driving, 3D printing mechanisms together. Dolapo Toki was next to come on, adding software engineering expertise. In January 2017, we grew explosively. We were prototyping, fundraising, testing, and competing. NASA hosted a "3D-Printed Habitat" contest, and although we were already overly busy, we entered a team along with stiff competition - 40 universities and corporations against our little 5-person team, eager to showcase technologies and techniques that would find their way to Mars.
