The first humans to live on the Moon and Mars will make their home in life-sustaining modules built on Earth. But there is no question of continually filling rockets with food, cement, and other consumables to support new human colonies. Living on other worlds hinges on our ability to live off those lands.
“The initial habitat should be built on Earth; it is way more expensive, but it is safer,” says Dr Christiane Heinicke, who leads a team designing a pre-fabricated Moon and Mars base at the University of Bremen. “In the long term, if we send more people there and really want to have a permanent presence there, I think it makes much more sense to use local materials to construct the habitat. [...] On the surface of the Moon and Mars you have this regolith and you have so much of it you can use it for construction.”
Lunar regolith – mineral and glass dust generated by the unrelenting bombardment of the surface by radiation and meteorites – is one of those...