Orbital Plastic Refabricator

A closed-loop recycler that turns a spacecraft's plastic waste back into usable 3D-printer filament, modeled on NASA's ISS Refabricator demonstration. Shredded scrap is drawn into a heated barrel where a thermal model governs how fast it reaches melt temperature; once hot enough, a screw-driven volumetric flow pushes the melt through a nozzle, and a spool motor draws it out as filament whose diameter is set purely by conservation of volume between the two rates. A recycle-pass control captures the real degradation recycled polymer suffers from repeated remelting, so pushing the same batch through again visibly costs strength and diameter stability — the same trade-off that limits how many times orbital waste can be refabricated before it must be replaced with fresh feedstock.