Colonizing - Reseacrhers At The University Of Manchester Are Working On Building Materials For The Moon and Mars

     One of the many challenges of constructing buildings in space is that it will require cost-effective building materials generated on site. It would be prohibitively expensive to be launching bricks and mortar into space.
     Researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. are working on create building materials for possible Martian habitats. The new building materials drew inspiration from ancient construction methods that involved mixing animal blood into mortar to act as the binding material. Pig blood and lime mortar was one of the more notable mixes. The blood regulated the growth of calcium carbonate crystals. One study described this as being “one of the most important technological inventions in the Chinese architectural history.”
     In their quest for a Martian building material which then have dubbed AstroCrete, their research showed that a common protein in the blood called serum albumin could be used as a binder to produce a concrete like materials with compressive strength comparable to ordinary concrete. The team also discovered that urea, a waste product found in urine, sweat and tears could be incorporated to increase compressive strength more than three hundred percent.
     The researchers calculated that a crew of six astronauts on a two-year Mars mission could produce more than one thousand pounds of AstroCrete.   
     Now  the scientists at the University of Manchester in the U.K. have proposed using extraterrestrial dust, potato starch and a pinch of salt to create what they call StarCrete which would be strong enough for constructing buildings on the Moon.
     StarCrete created with materials found on Earth has a compressive strength of seventy-two megapascals (Mpa) which is over twice the toughness of ordinary concrete at thirty two MPa. StarCrete made with Moon dust has a compressive strength of over ninety-one MPa.
     Aled Roberts is the lead researcher on this project. He said, “Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood. Also, current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment which all adds cost and complexity to a mission. StarCrete doesn't need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible.”
      The researchers found that a fifty five pound sack of dehydrated potato chips contained enough starch to produce almost half a ton of StarCrete. This amounts to two hundred and thirteen standard bricks. A three-bedroom house has about seven thousand five hundred bricks.
    The team found that adding magnesium chloride greatly improved the strength of the bricks. The researchers have recently launched the sustainable building materials tech company DeakinBio. They hope to bring their biocomposite building blocks out of the lab. They need to find a robust solution to the moisture-sensitive starch binder to also make StarCrete Earth-friendly. With around eight percent of global CO2 emissions coming from the production of cement and concrete, a strong, green alternative might be a welcome addition to this planet also.