So what would a 3D printer use to make this habitat, well no one's interested in hefting giant printer cartridges filled with tons of cement inside them into orbit and then landing them on Mars, so people are looking toward materials that might already be on Mars, like say, martian sand, or maybe parts of spaceships that, once used to get folks down to the surface were just going to be junk littering the martian surface. Contestants are looking at ways to process these materials, feed them into an industrial 3D printer and have it create a martian building.
There will be two phases to the competition. The first phase will focus just on contestants' ability to use the unique possibilities of 3D printing to create unique pieces of architecture. The top 30 submissions will compete for a prize of $50,000.
The second phase of the competition will focus more specifically on space and will have two levels. Level 1 will focus on participants' abilities to develop the fabrication techniques necessary for habitat construction on other planetary bodies, and how to use materials that are already there (wherever there might happen to be). Level 2 will focus on the actual 3D printed habitats themselves. Each of these levels will award 1.1 million dollars to the winner.
(Sources: phys.org, Wikipedia)