ESA Space Bricks' landing at Lego Stores could help build real Artemis moon base

[Admin]

Scientists found the building bricks for moon bases in the toy store, and you can see them there, too. ESA researchers discovered more than inspiration from Lego while working on Artemis structures.

ESA Space Bricks' landing at Lego Stores could help build real Artemis moon base : Read more

 

[JPL_ACE]

Nice idea but you shouldn't use polylactide as binder as it is biodegradable and likely to degrade just from the sunlight. Not very realistic. It would be a nice research project to find a binder made from Lunar material, such as water (from ice) and some extractable chemicals in the dust. Another nice project would be to find a "brick" shape that allows curved structures (iglu comes to mind).

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Th e "binder" seems to be the issue, both for durability and availability.

There was another article (somewhere) about using solar power to melt and fuse regolith to make lunar roadways and other surfaces. I wonder it that would be more feasible.

The tradeoff seems to be whether it takes less fuel and flights to get enough binder or enough solar cells to the lunar surface to make a specific amount of bricks for a project.

Although solar cells last for a long time, they do degrade. So, it is not a way to get unlimited bricks once there are solar cells delivered to the Moon. And, getting the power to fuse regolith would require a lot of solar cells, or it would be a very slow process to make a pile of bricks.

Another idea might be a solar furnace, with mirrors located in rings around an elevated vat to heat the vat to temperatures sufficient to melt the regolith. But, I am not sure we could make a vat that would not melt along with the regolith. If feasible, regolith dust could be dumped in the top of the vat and what is really rock lava could be poured out of the bottom into molds to make the bricks, or maybe into a 3D printer of some type. But, the high temperatures necessary for that might make it infeasible to build the necessary tools to withstand the heat.