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NASA Announces the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge For Moon and Mars Bases
An anonymous reader writes: Space policy experts are still arguing where American astronauts should go once they venture into deep space. However, there is widespread agreement that once they get there they should be prepared to stay for longer than just a few hours or days, as was the case during the Apollo missions to the moon. Taking all the material to set up habitats, the astronauts' homes away from home, would tend to be expensive. Toward the end of lowering the cost of long duration space travel, NASA has announced the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, in partnership with America Makes, as part of the ongoing Centennial Challenge program.
Wait, scratch that. The majority of the dwellings will need to be underground to avoid the radiation. Instead of a 3D printer, take a tunnel boring machine.
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Calcium (a cement precursor) is present on the moon, and IIRC, one of the Mars Rover's missions was to locate calcium on the Red Planet.
Once shelter can be established, subsurface mining will uncover other useful raw materials.
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3D printing habitats on Mars and on the moon... okay, I'm guessing something similar to what's currently being done with concrete, but what about the materials? How are people supposed to make "Mars/moon concrete" for their tests? Also, printing with a different gravity will change a lot of parameters and how the layers interact with each other, curing speed with air vs in a vacuum, solar rays on earth vs Mars/moon, etc.
There's way too many variables that are completely different for such a challenge to represent what will actually happen.
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Obviously, the first step will be to 3D print an IKEA store on Mars.
I wonder how hard it would be to print or mold glass using in situ materials and maybe some materials from Earth to form glass arches/domes for greenhouses. Silicon is abundant on Mars like any rocky body though I am not sure of the difficulties of extracting any impurities (namely iron oxide) from it. There appear to be entire dunes made of glass on Mars which could be harvested and presumably melted down into glass of some form. Throw in a little lead (preferably molded into the interior of the glass) or just make the glass extra thick and you have pretty good radiation shielding as well as leaded glass about 3" thick is the equivalent of 18 MM thick lead sheet (not sure of straight glasses radiation qualities).
Living underground covers it. In fact, the Moon and Mars already have lava tubes and caves, so no large scale excavation needed.
You might find this of interest: "Concrete on Mars - Brandon Larson - 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention"
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Radiation levels as recorded by Curiosity on the trip were only double that of either LEO or Mars, while definitely not good even without additional shielding you're probably not looking at too much additional cancer risk. Putting significant amounts of radiation shielding around one small area of the craft where the crew is likely to spend most of their time (the cockpit, sleeping quarters?) would easily bring the trip exposure levels down to something a little more reasonable. With ZERO additional shielding (assuming of course they weren't hit by a solar storm) on a round trip to Mars of over 2 and a quarter years Astronauts would only be exposed to 1.01 seiverts (1 sievert lifetime spaceflight exposure is considered acceptable). By far most of that exposure as you noted is from the trip but with even the simplest radiation mitigation measures on Mars (piling dirt on living/sleeping quarters) and a solar storm shelter you could keep your exposure below 1 sievert and stay on Mars for many years. Though without heavy shielding on the transport multiple trips back and fourth for an individual would of course be very risky.