For years, Nasa funded a dream called SpiderFab – a spider-like robot that would crawl through orbit, weaving solar power stations and giant antennas from spools of carbon fibre – creating structures too large for any rocket to carry whole.

Although SpiderFab never ended up in space, scientists from the Shenyang Institute of Automation in northern China say they have built the key technologies to reach a similar goal.

The team first made the building blocks from a carbon-fibre composite, shaping it into long, hollow tubes using heat and pressure. They then added 3D-printed connectors, bonding the tubes to the joints with lasers to create strong, lightweight links without bolts or glue.

The researchers built a scaled-down antenna structure in the lab to show that the idea worked, they reported in the journal Space: Science & Technology on April 3.

The study offers a lightweight, high-strength and reliable approach to building large space structures in orbit, according to the institute, which was added to the US Entity List in 2022 over alleged links to China’s military, hampering its ability to access US technology and tech resources.

“Building structures in orbit removes the need to fold them into rockets or worry about size limits. Parts can be made, joined and assembled directly in space – potentially a core technology for next-generation space systems,” the institute said.

Today’s spacecraft are built on Earth and launched into orbit, but transporting them by rocket imposes hard limits. Rocket fairings can only hold objects of a certain size, and the intense force of launch restricts the shipment of delicate structures. That makes it hard to build systems stretching hundreds of metres or more.