Cityscapes on the Moon or Mars could begin with a single robot spraying lava-like mud for a landing pad and base camp. or signup to continue reading Space architect Melodie Yashar, from American technology firm Icon, will soon visit Australia to showcase off-planet habitats that are 3D-printed from local "soil". But rather than a "plan B" for a damaged planet, she sees space as the ultimate frontier to explore technologies and bring back tips for better ways of living on Earth.
"Space exploration is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human," she told AAP from Los Angeles. Best known for its affordable 3D-printed homes on Earth to beat the housing crisis, Icon is also working with NASA on landing pads, base camps, roads and garages for space buggies. "The reason why it's so appealing to NASA and other space agencies is that you can send up one construction robot and use the local materials that are already on the planet," she said.
Moon dust, or regolith, on the surface could be used as feedstock to create structures, instead of shipping in tonnes of materials from Earth. "Essentially we're fusing the material onto itself and it creates a lava consistency and once it's hardened it becomes a ceramic material," she explained. "The resources we're using are completely in situ," she said.
The field also examines the tremendous risks of living and working in a resource-constrained environment, where evacuation is not an option. "There's a whole slew of human and system-level .