The truth about 3D printing a lunar base with MOON DUST
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มิ.ย. 2024
- A new space race is on with very ambitious end goals like starting a permanent colony on the Moon, placing the first humans on Mars, and exploring other worlds in our solar system. As part of this revival of space exploration, NASA has awarded multi-million dollar contracts to 3D printing construction firms with the hopes of establishing lunar colonies by 2040.
What’s sparking this global fervor for 3D printing on the moon? How feasible is the technology in harsh lunar environments? And what does it mean for construction back on earth?
Mics I use: amzn.to/3mQ0VaQ
Shotgun mic I use: amzn.to/41AynAS
Camera I use: amzn.to/3UPqnd9
Lens I use: amzn.to/3mTEKR1
Thanks to our sponsor: www.insulation4us.com
Please support me on Patreon if you can: / belinda_carr
Video scripts and citations: www.carrbuilds.com
Podcast channel: / belindacarrpodcast
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:04 NASA Artemis program
2:00 What is regolith?
3:11 Lunar Colony proposals
4:50 ICON's Mars and Lunar Habitats
6:56 Advantages of 3D printed regolith
8:38 Sponsor
9:30 Disadvantages of 3D printed regolith
111:06 Conclusion
---------------------
One of the key components of NASA’s Artemis program is the Gateway space station. It will orbit the Moon and provide essential support for lunar missions. From lunar orbit, astronauts will ride to the surface of the Moon, landing where no humans have ever been: the lunar South Pole. This is the ideal location for a future base camp given its potential access to ice and other mineral resources. NASA’s long term vision is to establish a fixed habitat at the Base Camp that can house up to four astronauts for a month-long stay.
We can’t approach building a habitat on the moon in the same wasteful way we do on the earth. There’s no home depot we can run to for our weekend projects. We have to learn to live off the land and use local resources because every kilogram we send up there costs one million dollars. The most promising material we can use is lunar soil or regolith.
Regolith is a layer of loose, unconsolidated rock and dust that sits on top of bedrock. Lunar regolith has formed over the last 4.6 billion years from the impact of large and small meteoroids that break down surface rocks. We can excavate this powder to make a new building material. While regular concrete is composed of water, aggregate and cement, lunarcrete would be made out of regolith and sulfur.
Sulfur acts as a thermoplastic binding material. It can be mixed with regolith, heated to its melting point and then cooled down to make Lunarcrete. This sintering process can be achieved with concentrated sunlight. The resulting solid Lunarcrete doesn't need to be cured and it doesn’t need water. Using this mixture as a base material, construction companies around the world have come up with some pretty outlandish proposals for lunar colonies.
In 2022, ICON received an additional $57.2 million to develop Olympus, a 3D-printing system for the moon. They have teamed up with Bjarke Ingels Group and Search+ to design these donut-like igloos with waffled exteriors. The team is also experimenting with simulated or synthetic regolith. Instead of a nozzle squirting out soft concrete, a high-intensity laser beam melts the powdery regolith to transform it into a hard, strong, building material. ICON then sends their test prints to NASA, where they're blasted with a plasma torch to 4,000F . This test will tell us whether regolith can be used for landing pads. The next test will be operating the robotic arm and laser inside NASA's thermal vacuum chamber, which mimics the moon's extreme cold, heat and vacuum conditions.
---------------------
SOURCES:
• LINA by AI SpaceFactor...
• LUYTEN's Project Meeka...
• Spaceship EAC - studyi...
• Building a lunar base ...
• 3D printing homes on E...
• ICON 3D Prints the Fir...
• NASA's Mars Surface Si...
• 3D Printing on the Moo...
• Artemis: Onward to the...
---------------------
Disclaimer: The Amazon links in this description are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission for my endorsement or recommendation to products or services linked above, but I wouldn't put them here if I didn't like them! Your purchase helps support the channel and the video I product. Thank you!
This video was created for educational/informational purposes and qualifies as Fair Use. If you are the creator or own the footage featured in this video and have reservations please notify me via TH-cam comments or email and I will accommodate you
#3dprinting #regolith #architecture #concrete #3d - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![ความรักของยักษ์เขียว (ทศกัณฐ์) - เดี่ยว ไออุ่น [OFFICIAL MUSICVIDEO 4K]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yCCy-QVHqK8/mqdefault.jpg)
I’d like to see how that Regolith+Sulfur reaction works chemically because it seems like a fantastic start on reducing the water use and energy demands for concrete, as you broadly pointed out. It would be wild if we could develop some kind of powder 3D printing or the ability to sinter entire structures.
And how will the material stand up to rain and wind? (JOKE!)
Excellent video and good points! Neutron bombardment is a complicated issue, since many techniques involves atomic capture of the neutron, which results in a thermal output in the form of gamma rays. Overall protection is a complex and multi-layered challenge.
Every good architecture channel finds, sooner or later, that their most-watched videos are the sci-fi ones. I'm not complaining though. I like the way your channel does some practical, some fantastical. Keeps it fresh.
I always appreciate the effort you put into your videos to make sure everything is fact checked and always point out the disadvantages and limitations of current technology. I am very excited for innovation in space exploration and colonization and your videos make me optimistic for the future of humanity 🤩 Keep it up, Belinda!
I want to see Flint Stones-esque renderings where the engineers actually realized all interior furniture also has to be made of rock. Ikea furniture is EXPENSIVE on the moon. A flatscreen TV? steel chairs? what a luxury.
This is serious and you're making jokes! We can't call them the Flintstones! The Regolith's! Fred Regolith and Barney Crater. Ok that stupid. Fred Lunastone? No no. I was just fine before I read your post. Now I have to rename the entire cast. Dang I'll be back
I generally agree most with those suggesting the use of prefabbing, 3d printing is extremely effective at producing extremely strong flat objects, but not so much vertical structures, arguably the best use for a 3d printer on the moon is using it to print many flat plates of regolith derived concrete to form the outside walls of a structure, making a biodome type structure from regolith panels, support bricks and beams would seem to be far more practical and allow for a lot of simple modularity and repairability in the designs that could then be partially buried beneath loose regolith to apply even pressures from above and protect from radiation. If we're not extensively tunnelling, that seems like one of the better middleground designs that'd be practical and pretty easy for a handful of astronauts or robots to assemble in situ.
From an AP News Article:
“The walls should be 80 centimeters (about 2 1/2 feet) thick, they said. Any thicker and the dirt will emit its own secondary radiation, created when galactic cosmic rays interact with the lunar soil.”
I wonder if two shells of beehive-like residences at only 40 centimeters thick, each, would provide satisfactory insulation with a void of air in-between the walls? The entirety of the walls/roof could also be 3D printed with the beehive shape-think of the interior ceilings in pyramids and how they hold themselves up by height. A doorway tunnel would have to be double walled as well.
What happened to tunnel models? I think i saw like 10 years ago (likely longer) a proposal of landing a robot into a crater, so it's "underground" and you can drill directly horizontally. There are enough craters with the depth to get a few meters of roof (ceiling?), but don't need to bring a too extensive railroad system or such for material removal.
Fascinating video. I'm excited to see the advancement of these technologies on Earth and the lunar surface.
This is my favorite subject in existence - I won't be happy until we can construct volumes (in a vacuum) that we can pressurize and use - more printers! launch all the printers!
Pumicecrete is by far the best building material on the planet Pumicecrete is a mixture of pumice cement and water mixed and poured into a set of reusable forms walls are poured from 12"to 24" thick pumicecrete is fireproof termite proof rust rot and mold proof non toxic and has a high R value and good sound attenuation solid poured walls means no critters can live in your walls Pumicecrete can be built for a fraction of the cost and time and pumice is one of the few building materials that can go directly from the mine to the job site ready to use without any additional possessing and zero waste
Take care Ray
Great video 👍
Great studio setup and presentation
I'm curious if there's a genuine benefit to building habitats as opposed to digging them. wouldn't it be easier and faster to dig out a bunker, using the underlying rock as the structure of a moon or mars base? It seems less sci-fi, but it also seems much more viable to me.
I'm very excited about this. When I first saw 2001 A Space Odyssey back in the 70s, plus all the actual moon landings, I was convinced that a base on the moon was just a few years ahead. Pretty sad that we let that momentum die. I think a downside here is that, sure, private companies are going to be mostly doing this, but it will result in a lot of fragmentation of the tech and will lose the robustness that would have resulted had NASA done the whole thing in-house.
Belinda, Love your frank & astute stance. When things bother me about reports and Ideas you're first to notice and nail them down. I'm working hard to send you a presentation on reconciling lack of design concerns about 3Dp and Ai. All said and postulated, Boring into the Moon is the direction to go in. Subterranean establishments can solve so many of the challenges ( like the little mention you gave on cryogenics that happen at sunset ha ha ha ) & teach and collaborate on what we need to try on Earth. Nuclear fission and fusion on the Moon can have their heyday. Let er rip ! But please, preserve the face of the Moon. Where ever these initial concepts point, they teach us. Looking the opposite way, I've found, changes all the equations that perturb you.
Cool video Melinda.. let me jump in..
An easy way to tell if a lunar habitat proposal was not actually thought through is the presence of a starship so close that it would blow the whole settlement away on take off or landing.
really excellent channel
Belinda! X
Hi Belinda - I've seen several videos lately about people building homes out of grain bins! There are several listings on Airbnb for these types of buildings. It's very interesting and I'd love to hear your opinion. Maybe you could do a future video about them. Thanks.
i understand mars with its nice rounded weathered regolith particles, but would wonder whether the sharp unweathered lunar regolith particles would limit the 3-d applications there. ie no where internal where dust from anything coud ever get at human lungs. -- no weather on the moon, so dust like lil obsidian knives.
Is the sulfur also there, and what percentage is needed for the lunacrete.
Is SULPUR readily available on the moon?
There’s probably a good reason why this isn’t viable, but it seems like tunneling under the lunar surface would make more sense than trying to build on top of it, at least for a starter habitat. Trying to build a structure on the surface thick enough to protect from all the radiation seems like it would pose a lot more challenges than just tunneling into the rock and having an underground habitat protected by the rock.
I'd love to see a video on uv window films. Hard to trust any figures being put out, and have to wonder if they're so great, why they're not more popular.
Any habitat on the Moon needs to be pressurised to 1 atm in a vacuum environment; that is a lot of stress that 3D printing cannot manage.
On the Moon of course you don't have high winds, flooding or any water erosion, you have lower gravity. On Earth all of those things determine what you can design and build.
On the Moon I'd go with building underground or partially in the ground, and Moon stones carved into igloo-ish bricks and stacked together.. no mortar needed. The go with the 3D printed on a bigger scale. Need to get there and get places for people to live first.
Good research - well done!
Check out WASP 3D printing out of Italy that make large scale printers using local materials.
I feel like the developments are on the right track, but lunar bedrooms will probably be underground. Or maybe they're better off building underground complexes for habitation?
I also find it weird there are no solar panels in any rendering. Surely the majority of power needs will be fulfilled by solar, since um...no atmosphere and no sky.
@belinda Carr, may I ask your academic background?
as I am currently an apprentice in civil engineering. I am curious about your journey.
Most of the local energy cost will be to heat regolith. Sun is free, but solar pannels have weight. Heating is not so hard in space since there is no dissipation. =» is there a way to recover energy from the formed regolith ?
Black body radiation is very slow, so we have time to grab it, but how to use contcat heat transfer and heat pump to recover that energy ?
Have you done any research on combining 3D printing with prefab construction? I can see a future where standardized pieces can be used to build quickly, with site irregularities or custom elements added on. The 3DP could be for speeding up, making a standardized foundation to attach the prefab to, or just architectural style
The problem with 3D printers is you have to bring it in and set it up. Then you have to have the mix all ready and no faults can happen.
What would work is robots building with bricks. Its a far better viable solution that solves a major amount of problems. Bricks can be factory sized. Bricks can be glued (like motar yet better and stronger ) bricks require only a few robots that can set up any time. Plans can be inserted and several pairs can build the building very quickly.
3d printing just has too many flaws that can happen.
That also works, i guess I’m thinking of automation to get rid of unique issues, combined with standardized offsite construction for speed.
You would also still have to set up the brick-laying robot as well. Less challenging than the 3DP sure, but presumably not negligible.would also be interesting to see how quickly you can change the brick laying pattern on the fly vs a 3D print
@@danielgregory5259 Of the brick laying robots out there and their concepts its far faster and better than the 3d printer which has to be set up to cover the entire building structure and be level. All the concrete, pump trucks and everything else needs to be set up. Where a brick laying robot only requires the pallets of bricks to be set near or inside the building. It does not require to be level or set up as it can move about the site as it needs to. The only thing it needs is a lay out program and a starting point or a few reference points. As long as the building is only a few stories high the entire structure can be built with bricks including the color layout, brick style and so on. There is a glue that can be used instead of motor this makes the entire build process far faster and far better. Glue can allow for a building to be built with one size brick or with a specific set of bricks.
There are advantages to robots including human robots which are likely to see markets in 5 to 20 years. The faster they bring basic labor robots to the market the less we will require 3d printers. Humanoid robots can fill the labor pool and allow for companies to build better homes for far less. WIth a couple dozen human robots on site supervised by one human the labor can be next to nothing. A single person can charge 10k in labor for a 30 day build and make more money/profit than they would have before. Robots are the future and money will be less of a thing. The more robots we have the better lives and things will be/get.
0:52 Your intro music sounds like you are about to get hot and heavy with a chocolate lava cake.
I don't know if it fits with your channel though.
I would rather see the money spent here on earth. There are way more important things that need to be done here first. The evolution of technology down the road will be mature, for use on the moon.
Has any 1 ever pressurized the Structure too 15 psi or more to simulate conditions on the moon
Now thats an airtight structure ;) passivhaus pffft.
Merci! Some youtuber take there public for idiots. You do not.
perhaps some earth dust to house some ...well earthlings right here on earth...but I'm sure we'll find a way to complain about that...great 3D printing vids though
Underground tunnelling.
China's Chang'e 8 mission in 2028 will be carrying a reogolith 3D printer and also robots to use it to start China's permanent lunar colony.
3:47 moon quakes ???
Yes , when astroids strike.
@@manojthaku5496 👍🏻
You've lost weight. Looks good.
It seems to me that much of this is paying for 3D animations
long term space travel will require simulated earth gravity and Schumann resonance for humans to survive the ordeal.
Super easy to have these built in a climate controlled factory. When they can plop one of these on the South Pole, then we can talk.
Hear me out. The answer has been tunnels and caves all along.
Sorry to be pessimistic, but I don't see this ever happening. We simply will not be able to afford such things. Aside from the inevitable graft and corruption in the government contract and funding process that will cost more and more as projects advance, we will need to expend greater and greater resources on weaponry here on Earth.
Opportunities for graft and corruption may be the ONLY reason needed for some to get involved in building habitats on the Moon.
Elon will do it
@@eddiegill 😂
The moon dust is so abrasive that no one or no machine can stay there for more than few days.
The Yutu-2 rover has been operational since 2019, so it's hard, but not impossible. There's been recent advances as well to help deal with the issue, such as space suits with active electric fields to repel the ionized dust.
Realistically, any feasible plan would need to send a fully self-replicating and self-repairing unit that can build its own replacement parts out of lunar resources. Which is...extremely difficult, to say the least. But given the pace that additive manufacturing is advancing right now, maybe not.
Nice video... until the ecological nonsense about preserving lunar surface
Space race is such a huge waste of money. Please don’t try to sell me on all the innovations we got from it. Put that money into ocean exploration and be realistic because no one will ever live for any length of time more than a few miles from earth.
Smart but like building projects has it's problems not mention no corner shop so a lot of problems to solve ❤😂🎉😢😮😅😊 as always I love ❤️ your show sweet girl
I would be interested in there being portable or "hand held" (heavy and likely requiring 2 nauts to carry and operate) or Cart/buggy towed system that can scoop up lithic material as you drive around with it
and then have a guy carefully prepare and lay jigsaw-type bricks and cubes of this stuff with crete-paste between layers to hold it together
or
to have the device "spin" and "spew" off of a loom like a spider spins silk while someone else either feeds the machine by pouring more and more dust into it, or is at the desposit site smoothing and shaping the lunar cotton candy into a structure. Cool too for on-the-spot damage repair. A hole from a meteor shower? get out the pastegun. blublubblublublub. (smoothes it with a trowel afterwards) ah. fixed.