Monday, September 13, 2021

Saint Peter's Burg on Mars

Last December we had a piece about making cement from regolith on our own Moon. Here is another concrete / cement: you. Rather, blood-plasma and urea. What urea we're not using for nitrates elsewhere.

They further point out the plasma need not be human plasma. The technology is literally mediaeval; Europeans were doing that soon after they lost the old Roman formula. If there is a population of rabbits, guinea-pigs, goats and/or whatever else Bob Zubrin wants to bring along, we should be able to use any of them. Although to start with they bias toward human since they assume we're not keeping guinea-pigs on the first Starship out there. UPDATE 9/14: Zim da Man makes a case for Miss Squeaky instead.

Incidentally they further found the chemistry behind the mediaeval concrete: “beta sheets”.

I repeat my hope from December that they have a plan for keeping the bricks together from the inside. We are all discussing a high pressure differential between air we can breathe and the outside, which (Venus and Titan excepted) is comparative vacuum.

They are looking at Mars on account, I guess, there's no regolith. But it should help for our Moon too since, dude, it's right here.

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