Will China succeed in building its base on the Moon? And above all, will she succeed in doing it with lunar soil? This is the whole question that the country is trying to answer by sending bricks designed with this innovative material into space to test them.
Made on Earth from components imitating lunar soil, they will be transported to the Chinese space station Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) by the Tianzhou-8 cargo ship, which should be launched Friday evening.
A base on the Moon hoped for by 2035
China has invested billions of euros in its space program in recent decades to catch up with the United States and Russia. It hopes to send an astronaut to the Moon before 2030 and build an international base there by 2035. Several samples of bricks, of different compositions, will be subjected to extreme conditions, similar to those encountered on the Moon.
“It will mainly be about exposing them to space,” Zhou Cheng, professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan (central China), told AFP, whose team of researchers made the bricks. “We will place them outside the space station and leave them there, exposed to the elements” in order to “see if their performance deteriorates or not,” he explains.
Extreme conditions on the Moon
Because any material on the Moon will have to face extreme conditions. Already, the temperature, which can vary drastically, potentially from 180 degrees to -190 degrees. Then, as the Moon is not protected by an atmosphere, it is hit by a large quantity of cosmic radiation and by micrometeorites. Lunar earthquakes can also weaken structures built on its ground.
Zhou Cheng and his colleagues developed a technique for making different types of bricks from materials available on Earth, including basalt. They were inspired by the material collected by the Chinese Chang’e 5 probe, which at the end of 2022 was the first mission in the world in four decades to bring back lunar soil.
Use lunar soil
These bricks, black in color, are three times more resistant than standard bricks and can fit into each other, avoiding the use of binder, which would be a challenge on the Moon, underlines Zhou Cheng. The team also designed a 3D printing robot to build habitats. “The goal in the future is to use in situ resources, lunar soil […] to carry out different types of constructions,” explains Zhou Cheng.
Making bricks directly on the Moon is something “obvious to try” because “it’s much less expensive to use materials available there than to have to ship them from Earth” with spacecraft, says to AFP Jacco van Loon, professor of astrophysics at Keele University (United Kingdom).
International competition
Other countries aiming to build a lunar base are working on the development of bricks imitating lunar soil. As part of NASA’s American Artemis program, which hopes to bring humans back to the Moon in 2026, researchers from the University of Central Florida are testing bricks made with 3D printers. The European Space Agency (ESA) has carried out studies on how to assemble bricks, drawing inspiration from the structure… of Lego.
The Chinese experiment “has a good chance of succeeding and the results will pave the way for the construction of lunar bases,” believes Jacco van Loon. China’s, called the “International Lunar Research Station” (or ILRS, for “International Lunar Research Station”), is a project launched jointly with Russia. According to official media, around ten countries (including Thailand, Pakistan, Venezuela and Senegal) and around forty foreign organizations are partners in the initiative.
