In late 2014, astronaut Barry Wilmore, aboard the International Space Station, mentioned that he could use a ratcheting socket wrench. There was no such tool on the station, no hardware store in orbit and no supply ship heading his way that could bring one.
The station did have something new on board, an experimental 3D printer that had arrived a few months earlier to test whether parts could be made in microgravity. Engineers on the ground designed a wrench to suit it, turned the design into a digital file and sent it up to the station.
The printer spent about four hours building the tool layer by layer out of plastic, and when it was finished the crew had a working ratchet wrench. Nothing had been launched, packed or shipped, because the only thing that had traveled from Earth was data.
That made it the first object designed on the ground and manufactured in space, and it proved a point that matters for long missions, where a crew can't wait months for a missing part. A file can cross the distance far faster than any rocket, and for the first time one had arrived as a tool.