Concrete blood and sweat for the first Martian colonists!

Many astronauts dream of it and Elon Musk has made it his reason for living: going to Mars and building colonies there, at least temporary at first. Indeed, it is today implausible to travel to the red planet on the model of the Apollo missions, says touch and gowhich consists of landing and leaving shortly after. Same with the Artemis III formula which will see the crew only stay a few days on the Moon.

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Why this impossibility with Mars? Because of the movement of the planets around the Sun, of course! Leaving Mars at an inappropriate time to return to Earth would effectively involve two years of space travel just to return. All you have to do is wait until our planet and Mars are close to each other again – every two years – to benefit from “only” six months of travel time. Yes, Mars does not orbit the Earth like the Moon and the colonists will therefore have to build shelters there.

Of course, the round-trip transport time is only one of the many technological, logistical and human challenges inherent to such a manned travel project. Very dangerous solar and cosmic radiation, community life in a ship, and the effects of weightlessness on the human body are some of them. This is why many people argue that it will remain out of our reach for a few more decades.

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This is obviously not the opinion of Elon Musk, who created his company SpaceX in 2002 with this sole objective. And when we observe the exceptional successes of the latter, the impossible does not seem to scare her. It would rather be the astronauts who feel fear, Musk himself having recognized a few years ago that the first Martian colonists would probably die there. Which is reminiscent of this famous quote from Churchill during his first speech to the House of Commons in 1940: “All I have to offer is blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Literally. And according to a scientific study recently made public, we could now add “urine”. Yes, it could well be that astronauts need their liquid bodily excretions…

Concrete made on site using Martian regolith

The Moon and Mars are covered in very fine dust made from billions of years of meteorites falling on their surfaces, which is called regolith. However, this would be of great use for producing “native” concrete and building barracks on the red planet.

Be careful, this concrete on Mars will face other constraints than that which we know how to use on Earth: little atmospheric pressure (200 times less than that we experience on our cows' floor), constant ultraviolet radiation, etc. It is therefore necessary to determine which type of regolith is the most promising. The study in question here points out that the best candidate is sulfur concrete, the most abundant on Mars according to analyzes carried out by the Martian landers and rovers Viking, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity.

An organic binder based on urea

AstroCrete had already been proposed in 1985 as a material and its binder was then… human blood, more precisely human serum albumin (HSA), a protein present in our veins and arteries. According to the authors of the latest study, less inclined to vampirism, the sulfur concrete proposal would be better according to many parameters. The Martian colonists will therefore not have to bleed to produce the organic binder, only to sweat, cry and urinate in order to extract the urea necessary for the latter!

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