CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The 3-D printing boom is about to invade space.

NASA is sending a 3-D printer to the International Space Station in hopes that astronauts will be able to one day fix their spacecraft by cranking out spare parts on the spot.

The printer, made by a Northern California company called Made in Space, is among more than 5,000 pounds of space station cargo thats stuffed into a SpaceX Dragon capsule that was supposed to lift off before dawn Saturday. Rainy weather forced SpaceX to delay the launch until Sunday.

Besides real-time replacement parts at the station, NASA envisions astronauts, in the decades ahead, making entire habitats at faraway destinations like Mars.

If were really going to set up shop on Mars, we have to do this, Jeff Sheehy, NASAs senior technologist, said Friday. We really cant afford to bring everything we need for an indefinite amount of time. Well need to get to the point where we can make things that we need as we go.

At Kennedy Space Center, the company showed off a number of objects made by its 3-D printers. On display was a scaled-down model of an air filter that the Apollo 13 astronauts devised to survive their aborted moon mission in 1970. It took five hours to print the model in a lab.

SpaceX is making the supply run for NASA, the same California company that just won a huge contract to deliver U.S. astronauts to the space station. Its Falcon 9 rocket with an unmanned Dragon is scheduled to blast off at 1:52 a.m. Sunday; slightly better weather is expected.

This April 2014 photo provided by NASA shows a 3-D printer after it passed flight certification and acceptance testing at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.Photo: AP

The small 3-D printer on board is a demo unit meant to churn out sample items made from the same type of plastic used for Lego bricks.

It was designed to operate safely in weightlessness inside a sealed chamber. The printing process is the same as on Earth, creating an object with layer upon layer of plastic.

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3-D printer being sent to the International Space Station