Blood, Sweat and Astronaut Tears
The Red Planet could earn its name with this ghoulish form of concrete (image: Alexander Antropov).
September is here and with it the official start of the spooky season. And what could be creepier than a house made of blood? How about a house made of blood IN SPACE?
Scientists from the University of Manchester have been looking at ways to build a base on Mars with the limited natural resources available and have suggested astronauts could use their own blood, sweat and tears as a binding agent for concrete on the Red Planet.
Aside from establishing the Martian Gothic as a new genre, the concept is born of practicality. Launching a rocket into space requires a vast amount of fuel, so everything onboard has to be winnowed down to be as light as possible. Astronauts can’t just chuck some bags of cement in the back and whip up a base when they get there – a single brick would cost $2m to bring all the way from earth.
Once people get to Mars, they’ll need to make use of what’s there. NASA has come up with a fancy acronym for this: ISRU, or in-situ resource utilisation. Mars has plenty of soil and rock, called regolith, but no water for binding it together. That’s where the astronauts’ bodily fluids come in.
“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.”
Protein extracted from human blood plasma can be used as a binding agent with regolith-style dust to make a material that’s as strong as concrete. To make this even stronger, the scientists tested adding urea to the mix, which upped the compressive strength by 300 per cent. Urea can be obtained from sweat, urine and tears, all things astronauts can also helpfully provide, maybe by watching sad movies about Matt Damon getting left behind in space.
The University of Manchester team have christened this macabre material AstroCrete, presumably in honour of the people it is made out of. “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 the team’s Aled Roberts.
“It is exciting that a major challenge of the space age may have found its solution based on inspirations from medieval technology.”
AstroCrete could even be 3D-printed into the required shapes, suggested the scientists, presumably to give the poor astronauts a bit of a rest while making a base out of their own bodies. This sounds high tech, but animal blood such as oxblood was historically used as a binding agent in mortar. As well as providing a useful construction material, it was a hygienic way to dispose of slaughterhouse waste. “It is exciting that a major challenge of the space age may have found its solution based on inspirations from medieval technology,” said Roberts.
The scientists worked out that a team of six astronauts would be able to produce 500 kg of AstroCrete over the course of a two-year mission. In practical terms, they estimate every person on Mars would be able to build enough room for another astronaut, doubling the size of a habitat for future missions.
Spaceflight is already pretty stressful on the human body, so Disegno imagines the astronauts would need to be careful not to overextend themselves once they’re on Mars. As we covered in Disegno #28, even getting a postcard from the planet is hard work. As well as being a pretty metal way of making a new material, AstroCrete demonstrates that Elon Musk’s coloniser fantasies about building an entire city on Mars is entirely fanciful against the harsh realities of ISRU. Although of course he’s welcome to offer himself up as a blood sacrifice.
Story source: Futurism