Will China be able to build its moon base with lunar soil?
The country is trying to answer this question by sending into space, for testing, bricks designed with such an innovative material.
Manufactured on Earth from components that mimic the soil on the Moon, the bricks will be transported to the Chinese space station Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) by the cargo ship Tianzhou-8, scheduled for launch Friday evening, reports
China has invested billions of euros in its space program in recent decades to catch up with the United States and Russia. The country hopes to send an astronaut to the moon before 2030 and build an international lunar base by 2035.
Several samples of bricks, of different compositions, will be subjected to extreme conditions, similar to those on the Moon.
“It will mainly be about their exposure to space,” said Zhou Cheng, a professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, whose research team designed the bricks.
“We will place them outside the space station and leave them there, exposed to the elements” of the environment, to “see if they degrade or not,” he explained.
Any material placed on the Moon will have to endure extreme conditions. First, the temperature can vary drastically, perhaps from 180 degrees Celsius to minus 190 degrees.
Then, since the Moon is not protected by an atmosphere, it is hit by a large amount of cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. Moonquakes can also weaken structures built on its surface.
Zhou Cheng and his colleagues developed a technique for making different types of bricks using materials available on Earth, including basalt.
They were inspired by the material collected by the Chinese probe Chang’e 5, which at the end of 2022 was the world’s first mission in four decades to bring samples of lunar soil to Earth.
These black bricks are three times stronger than standard bricks and can be joined together, thus avoiding the use of binder, which would be a challenge on the Moon, Zhou Cheng pointed out.
His team also designed a 3D printing robot to build habitats.
“The goal, in the future, is to use the resources in situ, the lunar soil, to realize different types of constructions,” explained Zhou Cheng.
The manufacture of bricks directly on the Moon is “worth a try” because “it is much less expensive to use materials available there than to have to ship them from Earth” with spacecraft, Jacco van Loon, professor of astrophysics at the University, told AFP Keele of the United Kingdom.
Other countries aiming to build a lunar base are working on developing bricks that mimic lunar soil.
As part of NASA’s Artemis program, which hopes to return humans to the moon in 2026, researchers at the University of Central Florida are testing bricks made with 3D printers.
The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted studies on how to assemble bricks, taking inspiration from the structure of… Lego.
The Chinese experiment “has a high chance of success, and the results will pave the way for the construction of lunar bases”, estimates Jacco van Loon.
China’s “International Lunar Research Station” is a project launched together with Russia.
According to the official media, approximately ten countries (including Thailand, Pakistan, Venezuela and Senegal) and approximately forty foreign organizations are partners in this initiative.
