Chinese scientists working on the creation of a Moon base have sent fragments of brick into space to determine how they deal with its hostile environment, Space Daily reports.
The aim is to find out whether a habitable base can be printed using dust found on the Moon.
They were loaded onto a Tianzhou-8 rocket on Friday, and sent from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on Hainan island to the Tiangong orbiting space station.
Researchers at Wuhan’s Huazhong University of Science and Technology made prototype bricks from materials such as basalt, an igneous rock that is chemically similar to Moon dust.
The bricks are three times stronger than a conventional house brick, and interlock without the need for mortar. Nevertheless, they have to withstand an ultra-high vacuum, 270-degree variations in temperature and continuous bombardment by cosmic radiation.
Wuhan University professor Zhou Cheng said the aim was to put the material in space and “let it sit there” to see if the bricks degrade over time.
Zhou’s team developed their prototypes after analysing soil brought back by China’s Chang’e-5 probe in 2020.
The team has also worked on the “Lunar Spider”, an autonomous printer that will be used to build structures in space.
China and Russia are planning to build the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). A dozen countries, including Thailand, Pakistan, Venezuela and Senegal, are partners in the initiative, as well as some 40 non-governmental organisations.
The aim is to build a base near the Moon’s south pole, at the centre of a 100km-radius “zone of investigation”.
If all goes according to plan, the base will expand into a network of research facilities by 2050.
- Watch an animation of the plan:
As part of the preparations, researchers at the University of Central Florida are testing potential building bricks of their own.
The European Space Agency has carried out studies on how to assemble bricks based on the structure of Lego.
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