NASA once planned SpiderFab, a massive, spider-like robot designed to weave orbital structures. However, scientists from northern China claim they have successfully developed the core technologies needed to achieve a similar goal.

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...