Bricks made of a mix of saltwater and dust from the moon or Mars can withstand enough pressure to be used in any future extraterrestrial construction. But astronauts planning on making these will need to figure out how to bake them first.
at the University of Central Florida and his colleagues wanted to know whether the dust and loose rocks on the moon and Mars, known as regolith, could be made into sturdy bricks. But as lunar and Martian regolith aren’t readily available on Earth, they tested two synthetic materials that mimic them closely. They mixed these materials with a solution of table salt and water, then used a type of 3D printer to make cylindrical bricks.
The researchers baked the bricks at various temperatures for about an hour. They then applied high pressure – simulating the stress of holding up a building – to test the bricks’ sturdiness. Some samples crumbled, but those that were baked at 1200°C held up better than even some regular, Earth-made bricks. The best of them withstood approximately 25 million Pascals, or 250 times more than Earth’s atmospheric pressure.
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Ghosh says that this finding and the relative simplicity of his team’s method make it a good candidate for construction in harsh and sparse extraterrestrial conditions.
“We did no special pre-processing,” says Ghosh. “It is as simple as digging up dirt, putting it in a 3D printer, making a brick and heating it.”
Some of his students even designed new 3D printers that would be cheap to assemble and easy to pack on spacecraft. However, off-world brick making would also require ovens that could be heavy to transport or need lots of power. Ghosh says that one workaround may be to design ovens that focus and amplify heat from the sun, but that idea needs to be studied more.
at the University of Texas at San Antonio says that water will be rare on planets other than Earth and will probably be prioritised for drinking or farming. Power for operating machines will also be limited, so construction methods like Ghosh’s will have to work within many constraints, he says.
at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India, says that the only way humans could live in space is by perfecting technologies that use resources that are already there. “Ancient humans thrived by adapting to local environs, and as we leap into space, we won’t be any different,” he says.
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