MOON CONSTRUCTION 101

Building out the lunar ark will be an expensive endeavour, considering it costs about $700 to put a 0.45 kg payload into Earth’s orbit, according to NASA. That’s why scientists want to avoid lugging cement into space; instead looking for ways to use moon rocks, says Sven G Bilén, PhD, professor of engineering design, electrical engineering, and aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

‘The regolith that’s on the

Moon is a very, very challenging regolith to work with, because it’s essentially these tiny little razor blades, they’re very jagged and sharp, they’ve never had a geological process to form them,’ says Bilén, who is not involved in the lunar ark project. So, building this kind of complex would likely require an entire moon-rock mining operation, as well as a processing centre where operators could melt the rocks down into a flowable cement.