Moon dust could be used to build Lunar Lodgings

Now, with all of the talk about Virgin Galactic doing space flights for tourism purposes, others talk of a manned Mars mission....
These are expensive endeavors. They cost way more than the rocket I tried to build in the backyard out of Pringle's cans, roman candles, and ice cream scoops. While my backyard project eventually became a time machine/tailgate party tent, I realized going to space costs money.

What better way to save money, than to use materials available?

ST. LOUIS — A team of astronomers has cooked up an out-of-this-world recipe for lunar concrete that could be used to build homes on the moon. The innovative recipe of carbon, glue and moon dust, which produces what looks like a hockey puck, could also be helpful in building other structures on the moon, including giant telescopes and solar power arrays

This will save all kinds of time/money/materials for scientists, as it will mean less stuff to take up in their expensive rockets (that they wont let me have). Building telescopes/structures would be much easier.

Personally, I would build something more lucretive, like a Wal Mart, or Dairy Queen, but thats just me.

After several iterations, one of which yielded what Chen described as "gooey and smelly," the team created a strong material with the consistency of concrete. Next, they coated the material with epoxy and spun the wet lunar concrete to form a 12-inch-wide (30-centimeter-wide) bowl-like structure shaped like a telescope mirror.

After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminum, and voilà, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror," Rabin said

Rabin seems pretty sure of himself, but I think he has missed something very important. No one wants to deal with "gooey smelly" stuff. I know what you are thinking "You cant smell in space!".

I know that. It's the principle of the matter. I dont want to smell bad when I get back to Earth. Astronauts are popular with the ladies. Duh.


What do you think? There seem to be great advantages. It's very much like they way we built things here on Earth, long ago and today still.
Could this eventually be used for a Lunar base? If that base is oxygenated, would it still be smelly?

Original Article

[edit on 10-12-2009 by InertiaZero]

I think it's a great idea. Rather than having to take up bricks and mortar and everything else you'll need to build a sturdy hotel or whatever they want, all they need is a few ingredients to polish off the huge resource that already exists there.

With a bit more brain-power thrown into the thought of this, I'm sure they'll come up with even more efficient and effective ways of doing this. I think the next problem they'd need to over-come is being able to breathe up there without the use of those funky space-suits.