“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 be inside us all along,” said Dr Aled Roberts, who worked on the project. Incorporating urea – a waste product excreted through urine, sweat and tears – could further increase the compressive strength by over 300 per cent in the best cases, to reach strengths of 40MPa.
The material, which the scientists termed 'AstroCrete', has compressive strength as high as 25MPa, comparable with the 20-32MPa strength observed in ordinary concrete.
In a study ('Blood, sweat, and tears: extraterrestrial regolith biocomposites with in vivo binders') published in Materials Today Bio, scientists demonstrated that a common protein in human blood plasma - human serum albumin - could act as a binder for simulated Martian or lunar dust to produce a concrete-like material. However, there is an important overlooked resource available to any crewed mission: the crew themselves. Proposals for in-situ resource utilisation tend to focus on sparse water deposits and regolith (loose rock, soil and dirt) available on the Martian or lunar surface. Using local materials is known as in-situ resource utilisation. If humanity is to establish permanent colonies on other astronomical bodies, it must find some way of constructing buildings from local materials transporting a single brick to Mars has been estimated to cost around $2m.
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