Part of the articles point is that for furniture getting plastic in the right shape would be hard. Sure you can use a 3D printer but furniture is massive. You can make a mold… but with what?
Heat welding plastic sheets should be a lot easier to work with than wicker. Wicker is very labor intensive unless there's something I'm missing.
On earth we just make a mold when we want to make something out of plastic, but on mars it would make sense to have one mold for some kind of plastic sheet (perforated?) that we can thermoform by hand with a heat gun, heat weld together, etc.
On earth we just make a mold when we want to make something out of plastic, but on mars it would make sense to have one mold for some kind of plastic sheet (perforated?) that we can thermoform by hand with a heat gun, heat weld together, etc.