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Va. Tech Students Create Experimental Bricks For the Moon
goran72 writes "Students from the college of engineering at Virginia Tech in the US have made highly durable bricks composed of a lunar rock-like material, which one day might be used to build dwellings in colonies on the moon."
is it air tight?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The creation of moon bricks = The first step in the collapse of the lunar housing market.
Test me and I will chronicle your pain - The Archivist (Diablo 3)
Who would've thought reading too many times the same fable to your children could have such results.
Damn you little piggies!
Aluminium is present in the moons crust, but some big nuclear reactors are going to be needed.
First for aluminium production, then for the brick making.
According to Faierson, one-square inch of the brick could withstand the gradual application of 2,450 pounds.
This strength would enable it to withstand an environment where gravity is a fraction of the pull on Earth.
What does compression strength have to do with minimal gravity? (Other then you can build a structure 3x as heavy on the moon without worrying about the bricks breaking)
Kudos to the team for making the connection from armour plating tanks to building structures.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
is there in the composition and the structure of the rock/dust on the moon, is it all the same? i would imagine this is a key point if you are going to make bricks out of it, imagine having a fool proof plan to make bricks out of sandstone when you moved somewhere and only finding granite
Apple, too, has been experimentally creating bricks for years.
Bricks could never provide the same level of radiation shielding and meteorite protection as tens of meters of lunar regolith. Tunneling is the best option.
what exactly will this be used for? It makes more sense to build a digger.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
But every sci-fi show and book ever made promised me a bio-dome! Man, can't even trust science fiction anymore.
"Our house, in the middle of our (moon)"
"Here in my (lunar rover), I feel safest of all, I can lock all my (modules)"
"All in all it's just another (moon) brick in the (Lunar-based space dwelling)."
I've been in the moon rock vault at NASA in Houston. Along with rocks, they have a sample of "moon concrete" that someone (on Earth) made out of real moon rocks many years ago, presumably also for future moon colony building.
Between concrete and bricks, apparently our future moon colonies are going to look like Soviet-era eastern Europe.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I sure hope no one shoots down their idea.
Bugs? Have the arachnids reached the moon already? Call out the mobile infantry...
Pr the Terran Federation Navy (from David Weber /Steve White's Stars at war series.)
Solar Energy on the moon is much better then on earth. 2 weeks of sunlight, no clouds.
... Followed by two weeks of cold and darkness. Better have some really good batteries, or a good transmission system to that moon base on the far side so that you can supply each other with energy when the sun goes down on your respective sides. At least on Earth you don't have to store the energy for so long, which does help somewhat.
The lunar poles aren't much better: You never do get a lot of light on a lot of surface area unless you build some very large hills or towers so that you always have a large surface area pointing at the sun, plus you only get two possible locations for your colony.
Still, probably not a bad tradeoff if you can solve the problems.
Oddly enough, the students' could be heard chanting "Zune for the Moon!" over and over.
I really can't figure out why, though.
Why don't you and your project advisor try to create
experimental bricks for EARTH?
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
Too bad concrete needs water.
I opened the article and got infected with a virus... dumb windows crap. Isn't there a way to report malware on this site?
You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided the cosmic rays, but you decided to spill my mutated DNA. You forced me into a brick corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have brick dust on your hands that will never wash off.
http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song
Ummm...why not just live in tunnels or caves. We cannot allow a mine-shaft gap! That would provide better structure for pressurized environments and protection from tiny meteorites.
THL phish sticks
While I applaud the ingenuity of all involved, I must say I've seen more clever and useful ideas at the occasional high-school science fair.
1. The chemical composition of lunar surface material has been known for quite some time.
2. It would literally be child's play to produce a workable cement or concrete mixture from the regolith. Absolutely high-school chemistry.
3. Thermal curing is self-evident.
4. (Kudos, I suppose, for using a wire down the middle of a brick to compensate for the lack of a thermally conductive medium, like an atmosphere.)
5. Why would one ever consider using bricks on the moon? I can't think of a less-logical building material for the lunar environment. The less seams in your construct, the better.
I understand that the curing method could easily be applied to larger modules, if not whole structures at once. You could 'cure' an entire building at once, for example, if you designed it the right way.
But the article seems to be going out of it's way to focus on the manufacture of 'bricks'; which to me means 'mortar', which to me means 'seams', and that rhymes with 'means', there will be trouble in Lunar City.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Go Hokies!
The best song ever on the interweb.
Stick Men
Maybe I'm just missing the point, but could anyone explain to me exactly why a moon-colony or whatever would have to be made out of "lunar rock-like" materials?
Archaeologists will dig up the first lunar base and discover it was built entirely with iPhones.
Nonsense.
For starters, your math may be ok, but I don't think your model is right. Aside from that, a lot of tires can take close to three times that much relative pressure, and have you ever seen a retaining wall holding back a hillside? Want to calculate how much one of those holds back?
How about this. If this brick is the same density as typical bricks and two feet thick, it's going to weigh something like 24,000 pounds. A standard brick should be able to easily take ten times its own weight. The major issue is really the design of the structure. If you make a domelike structure out of them and then pack dirt or lunar dust over it, I think it should hold up pretty well.
There's been some doubt expressed regarding the utility of brick construction on the moon. While there are some potential issues which will need to be kept in mind, it is a pretty good way to build a colony on the cheap.
Brick structures have excellent strength in compression. The tensile strength of brick, however, leaves something to be desired. If a brick structure built on the surface were pressurized, it would simply explode. Some way must be found to keep the structure under compression at all times. The simplest way to accomplish this is to bury your brick building under a suitable quantity of regolith (lunar dirt).
Assuming you want to maintain an atmosphere of 35 kPa (about 5 psi) inside your structure (1/3 the pressure here on Earth, but perfectly suitible for humans as long as it's richer in oxygen) you'd simply need to bury your building at least 7.2 meters below the surface. For those of you who are wondering where I pulled that number from, just divide the desired pressure (35000Pa) by the density of lunar regolith (about 3000kg/m^3) multiplied by the accelertion of lunar gravity (1.62m/s^2) and you get the required depth.
That's about 24 feet below ground, which is kind of deep, but you really want to be underground anyway to protect yourself from the constant bombardment of cosmic rays, extreme surface temperature swings, and incoming micro-meteors, so you're not really going to any extra trouble. To be safe, you'd probably want to give yourself some margin, say 30ft below the surface.
Dig out you colony site, build the structures, then pile the dirt back on top. Spray some sort of air-tight coating inside, pressurize it and you're ready to go. If you spring any leaks, the warm, humid air from your habitat escaping through the regolith should freeze into permafrost that will seal the leak back up automatically.
As far as aesthetics, there's actually quite a lot you can do with brick. Recall that the Pantheon as well as a great many other famous Roman structures are built of brick. Various configurations of vaults, arches and domes can be laid out to create a colony to your exact specifications. Being buried, your colony wouldn't be much to look at from the surface. Inside, however, careful design and a good interior decorator can make it as homey, or as palatial, as you desire.
Just don't touch the walls while the solar storm is hitting.