[spaaaace]

Outer space. It’s the one place you can be confident no ambulance will show up if you have an injury, at least, not very quickly. When medical emergencies arise on the ISS or other spaceborne vehicles, you make do with the supplies you have or perhaps re-purpose some equipment. With the installation of NASA’s AMF (Additive Manufacturing Facility) early last year, the possibility of 3D printing medical devices could help to bridge the gap between necessity and the need for a timely resupply.
To that end, astronauts aboard the ISS recently 3D printed their own medical device to help with hand injuries, specifically for mallet finger, otherwise known as extensor tendon injury or simply put, a jammed finger. If left unattended, serious damage and infection can occur and require surgery and medication to reattach the tendon. In most cases, ice and a simple splint are all that’s needed, but even the simplest of things are hard to come by in space.
The process of making and fitting the custom splint was easy and entailed using a 3D scan of the patient’s hand, which is done when fitting the astronauts to their space suits gloves. They then used the free open-source CAD modeler OpenSCAD to design the splint around the finger measurements and uploaded the model to the ISS where it was printed using NASA’s Made in Space solar-powered 3D printer.
www.solidsmack.com/fabrication/astronauts-3d-pr...
Астронавты распечатали на МКС шину для лечения, как я понимаю, вывихов пальцев, т.е. эта шина на пальце будет выглядеть вот так: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/...
Если палец сразу не заключить в шину, это может привести к плохим последствиям (как и любая травма, если её не лечить). Поэтому это хорошие новости для космических агентств, посылающих на МКС своих людей (ну и для будущего пилотируемой космонавтики).