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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."
The creation of moon bricks = The first step in the collapse of the lunar housing market.
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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.
The competing teams building the lunar straw house and the lunar stick house are still searching for suitable materials.
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
If you're looking to build some sort of permanent colony on the Moon, you're not going to want the people who live there to have to stay in their spacesuits all the time. Therefore, they need some sort of airtight living quarters. This brick seems like a neat idea for equipment storage or something like that, but probably wouldn't be too useful for living areas if it couldn't be made airtight.
Apple, too, has been experimentally creating bricks for years.
It could still be used for structural purposes, just add an airtight layer to the interior after the rest of the building is done.
Yes, the moon bugs are very bad in the sping and don't even get me started on Monsoon season!
They forgot about the 4th little pig, which built his house out of carbon nanotubes.
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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.
And what are you doing with the material you get from tunneling?
Bricks!
Or maybe really ugly figurines to sell to the tourists.
So you seal it. Bricks aren't water tight but some how my basement manages. Build the basic structure then cover it with self healing foam on the inside. Make it so that anytime there is an air leak it sucks some foam into the hole and seals it.
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.
Coat the bricks with a liner, like truck bed liner. I remember seeing a demo of that stuff where the salesman sprayed a concrete brick coated with the stuff and dropped it off of a building. The brick cracked, but the liner did not tear or separate from the brick. Neat stuff. Hopefully it can cure in a vacuum.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Bricks can provide vaults, which can provide cheap structural elements, which you can then cover with meters upon meters of regolith, using a cheap electro-Ford tractor, without needing complex tunneling equipment, explosives, and risk.
(Other then you can build a structure 3x as massive on the moon without worrying about the bricks breaking)
Fixed that for you.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Build the brick structure, and then inflate the living area inside it. You now have a living area that is protected from the elements by the brick structure, and is airtight due to the inflatable liner.
What about the "dome habitat" concept? Is that even feasible outside science fiction?
Cosmic radiation is probably the least of your worries. Unless you can shield yourself from nearly all of it (which is difficult at best), you can actually make your exposure worse because the cosmic radiation will interact with the material in the shielding to produce secondary radiation which can actually be worse than the cosmic radiation itself since it will interact more readily with matter (i.e., you).
But a lot of solar radiation is not nearly as energetic as cosmic radiation, and besides it would be very useful to have a protective heat sink so that your living quarters don't get too hot during the lunar "day" or too cold during the lunar "night."
3. Profit!
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Why not just scrape away 20ft of regolith, build structures with bricks made from the regolith, and re-cover with the remaining regolith? Sure, you can tunnel downwards from there as opposed to outwards, but I'm sure it's easier to use diggers and explosives to dig a big pit initially than it is to tunnel initially. Then you might as well expand outwards as you have the diggers and brick making facilities in place.
Of course, by the time we're doing that on the moon, there'll probably be a way to build giant structural arches and domes using carbon nanotubes by some form of extrusion growing process that just needs the regolith as input, a power source, and something to take the finished goods away and erect them.
Anyway, the biggest problem on the moon is the moon dust itself, which is really sharp and sticky, and thus really bad to get in your lungs, and nearly impossible to filter out in an airlock, and in a location with sparse water... ick.
Tolerable, possibly even enjoyable?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Well during the dark period I would suggest not making bricks and run off battery of energy light activities.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
He was eaten by the wolf while researching how to make long enough tubes.
Bricks are like violence or astraglide.
If it's not working, you're not using enough.
THL phish sticks