How to make a cheap and resistant house: with blood, sweat and tears of astronauts. This is the idea proposed by a team of researchers from the University of Manchester (England) as a means to greatly reduce the cost and increase the speed of construction for future Martian colonies.
AstroCrete
In an article published in Materials Today Bio , experts detail how dusty Martian soil can be mixed with the blood, urine and other bodily fluids of astronauts to build walls that would protect them from radiation and meteor strikes.
Transporting all the materials needed to create a human outpost from Earth would be too expensive and time consuming. Just by naming that taking a single brick from Earth to Mars would cost about $ 2 million, we already get an idea of how expensive it could be.
How to reduce costs and time?
Thanks to these resistant bricks combining lunar or Martian earth with a protein found in human blood and a compound called urea from sweat, tears or urine. The result is what they have dubbed AstroCrete, Martian (or lunar) concrete.
“Scientists have been trying to develop viable technologies to produce concrete-like materials on the surface of Mars, but we never stopped to think that the answer might lie within us all the time, ” said Aled Roberts, a researcher at the University of Manchester and Labor Leader.
The glue-like substance holds the elements together, producing a concrete-like material that researchers say is 300% stronger than ordinary concrete. They calculate that, in a two-year mission, a team of six astronauts could produce 500 kg of high-strength AstroCrete (although it takes about 1,000 kg to create 1 square meter of a single-level house).
Of course, each astronaut could produce enough cosmic cement to expand the habitat to accommodate an additional crew member , doubling the available housing with each successive mission, according to the team.
“Our calculations suggest that each astronaut, over the course of a Martian mission, could produce enough additional habitat space to support another astronaut, which could allow for the steady expansion of an early Martian colony,” the authors explain.
When?
Although it seems like a pretty interesting idea, it still requires a lot of research. We do not know the long-term health effects of continuous plasma donation in a low-gravity, high-radiation setting. We also do not know how much plasma can be extracted from a single person in a sustainable way and how it could affect fatigue levels. However, it could serve as a short-term solution as an impetus for the establishment of the future colony on our neighbor, the red planet.
Referencia: Aled D. Roberts, Dominic R. Whittall, Rainer Breitling, Eriko Takano, Jonny J. Blaker, Sam Hay, Nigel S. Scrutton, Blood, sweat and tears: extraterrestrial regolith biocomposites with in vivo binders, Materials Today Bio, 2021, 100136, ISSN 2590-0064, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mtbio.2021.100136.
