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Want to Live on Mars? You’ll Need to Make Some Martian Bricks

Scientists are working to transform Martian regolith into a radiation-shielding construction material.

[scinerds]

Settlements on Mars remain a long way off. Even after science figures out how to get there, making something light enough to carry to the Red Planet yet strong enough to withstand the perils of space is no picnic—just ask the folks making that inflatable habitat that didn’t inflate. But perhaps everyone’s been approaching this the wrong way. Rather than schlepping stuff to Mars, why not use materials that are already there?

That’s exactly what Eugene Aquino, Richard Kiefer, and Robert Orwoll hope to do. The chemists are working on turning Martian regolith (aka dirt) into bricks astronauts could use as building materials and radiation shields.

People have proposed using planetary resources like ice before, but regolith has a lot to recommend it. It is plentiful, for one, and easy to work with. Kiefer worked on a NASA experiment with lunar regolith 16 years ago. “That proved that you could take regolith and a polymeric material and make something that you could turn into a habitat—using only a microwave oven,” he says.