Space experts gathered in Washington for the 2023 Humans to Mars Summit, Vice reports, where a group explored construction and construction on the Moon and Mars.
Melody Yasher, who serves as vice president of building design and performance at ICON, previewed her company’s vision for lunar infrastructure based on 3D printing and additive manufacturing technologies… “We’re exploring how to create, first of all, a horizontal building elements such as landing pads and roads, and then ultimately thinking about how we can develop vertical building elements” such as “unpressurized structures and eventually habitats that are pressurized and certified for human habitation,” he added. he ICON plans to use lunar dirt, known as regolith, as a resource to produce a wide range of infrastructure projects on the Moon with a single robotic 3D printing system. In 2022, the company won a $57.2 million Small Business Innovation Research contract from NASA to develop its lunar construction techniques…
Later in the same panel, Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of XArc Exploration Architecture Corporation, also offered a glimpse at the lunar technologies being developed at XArc subsidiary Astroport. Ximenes and his colleagues at Astroport are focused on making moon bricks from lunar regolith that can be used to build landing pads as part of their vision of a “Lunatron” brickmaker… Astroport is working with researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio. , to invent an induction furnace nozzle that heats lunar regolith so it can melt and then solidify into bricks. A series of specialized robots will then collect the materials on landing platforms that can accommodate robotic and crewed missions to the lunar surface. In addition to the company’s work on lunar technology, it has also created concepts for future human missions to Mars.