If we’re going to establish a base on the moon or a colony on Mars then we’re going to have to figure out new construction methods that take advantage of unusual building materials since we’re not always going to be able to take everything we need with us. Thankfully, if you find yourself on the Moon in need of something to construct a habitat urine in luck.
Futurism explains:
“In cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), a team of European researchers have conducted a… strange experiment. They mixed urea — the main compound found in mammalian urine — with materials, including Moon rocks, to test if we could one day use astronaut pee to build a lunar base.
The urea itself acted as a ‘plasticizer’ — stuff that allows us to shape other harder materials into different forms. In their unusual experiment, the team used an analog of lunar regolith, or loose Moon rock, and mixed it with the urea.
The big advantage: using local materials is a lot easier — and dramatically cheaper — than lugging heavy construction supplies from Earth.
‘To make geopolymer concrete that will be used on the moon, the idea is to use what is already there: regolith and the water from the ice present in some areas,’ Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Spain, and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production last month, said in a statement.
‘But moreover, with this study, we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used,’ Pamies explained. ‘The two main components of urine are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures.’
Using a 3D printer, the team squeezed out Playdough-like shapes out of the urine concrete. 3D printing has become one of the most promising ways to build structures on distant planets including the Moon and Mars.
After heating them up to a temperature of 80 degrees C (176 Fahrenheit), they found that the resulting structures could support heavy weights — even after eight freeze-thaw cycles that simulated several day and night cycles on the lunar surface.”
Using urine as a building block isn’t the only weird way that we’ll build structures in space. In fact, there’s an even weirder way in the works: using insects.
As Futurism puts it:
“A team of researchers are suggesting we could use one of the most common organic polymers on Earth to construct shelters on Mars.
The material, called chitin, is produced and metabolized by most biological organisms and makes up the bulk of the cell walls in fungi, insect exoskeletons, and fish scales.
Using only basic tools and simple chemistry, the team was able to construct a wrench and a scaled down model of a Martian habitat, as detailed in the paper published in the journal PLoS ONE this week…
To [Javier] Fernandez, bioinspired technologies could define ‘a new paradigm in manufacturing, and allowing to do things that are unachievable by the synthetic counterparts,’ according to a statement.
He argues that these technologies ‘are key not only for our sustainability on Earth but also for one of the next biggest achievements of humanity: our transformation into an interplanetary species.'”
I couldn’t agree more. If we’re going to realize that vision we’re going to have to show a willingness to think outside the box. Using urine and insects as building blocks is just the beginning.
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