Shipping things to the moon is expensive, and even after astronauts begin walking on the moon again, that isn't going to change. Every additional gram of cargo sent to the moon is another gram that must be lifted intoThis dilemma is especially prominent when it comes to building future lunar habitats. Of course, we aren't sure how building with moon materials will actually work; on have begun toying with a very interesting idea.
There is a slight catch: ESA's space bricks aren’t actually fashioned from moondust. For all the lunar samples that various missions have returned to Earth, lunar regolith is simply too scarce and scientifically valuable to use for bricks. Instead, ESA scientists turned to a simulant: regolith from a meteorite. Specifically,scientists used 4.5-billion-year-old material from a meteorite discovered in Northwest Africa around the year 2000.
Rahul Rao is a graduate of New York University's SHERP and a freelance science writer, regularly covering physics, space, and infrastructure. His work has appeared in Gizmodo, Popular Science, Inverse, IEEE Spectrum, and Continuum. He enjoys riding trains for fun, and he has seen every surviving episode of Doctor Who.