Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/28/esa-made-lego-bricks-out-of-meteorite-dust.html
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Given what I’ve read about the qualities of Moon dust (its sharp, jagged surfaces are undulled by wind or water, so it quickly wears through space suits and is super toxic - it’s like asbestos, functionally, so it damages the lungs similarly, as well as damages the eyes and skin, etc.), I look at these efforts to build Moon bases out of lunar dust with somewhat of a jaundiced eye, shall we say. Sure, let’s build a base out of super-asbestos, sounds great!
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The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill.
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I’m guessing that the ground up meteorite was turned into a paste using some type of binder, 3-D printed, then sintered together. Not that you would want to snort the dust, but sounds like something that could easily be done with complete automation, away from human contact until the product was finished…
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Just for the record, Luna 16 (September 1970), Luna 20 (February 1972) and Luna 24 (August 1976), returned samples of lunar soil to Earth as well.
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The ESA site is…thin on details; but going by the brief snippet of the printing process in one of their videos; it looks like they went with the (easy; but very dependent on that supply of moon hydrocarbons we all know is just waiting to be drilled…) approach of slapping the regolith in a polymer binder and calling it good.
One technique I’ve heard mentioned, which might not be blood-coughing hyper-cancer, is using solar furnaces(nuclear thermal if you prefer the good old days of sci-fi) to vitrify the regolith and use that. Still results in blocks that you can’t safely cut without aggressive dust control (made easier by the moon’s abunduant surface water making spray-down and wet working of large scale materials a wholly practical endeavor…); but as long as you don’t mess with it bulk glass is at least content to be distantly polite and standoffish.
Since this exercise is just using it as a filler for some sort of polymer it’s unclear what, aside from a stunt, is being achieved, since polymers are what’s responsible for the well-behaved lego brick behavior, brutally uneconomic to transport in construction quantities; and…unlikely…to hold up well in hard vaccuum environment where practically everything has a vapor pressure and you get the pure, uncut, UV just as Ra intended; not the weaksauce terrestrial stuff spoiled by ozone.
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For the record the linked Lego page calls it polylactic acid, which is easy enough to make from…um…plant starch. I guess maybe the hope is that can be made on location once the vast lunar farms get going? 
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Plus, as it wears down in use, you have your free-floating, carcinogenic dust again. I feel like all these plans for lunar habitats just don’t seem terribly serious. There’s a sci-fi fantasy, and all the plans are but rough sketches to make it seem plausible, but don’t work out the (significant) issues.
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Lunar farming should be trivial enough; what with the ample carbon and nitrogen locally available…
It does beat waiting geologic amounts of time for the rich lunar biosphere to turn into petroleum; but that’s not saying much.
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And Chang’e 5 which tested the sample return technologies used by 6 on the near side of the Moon.
Chang’e 8 sounds interesting, the plan is to do 3D printing from in-situ resources at the lunar South Pole. It’s due to fly in 2028.
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I think that the goal here would be to have a material that can be used for radiation protection, rather than the interior of a habitat. Picture curved versions stacked around a habitat that is a vertical cylinder. This might be better than trying to bury a lunar habitat.
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It doesn’t sound remotely practical for that, though. It continues to strike me as very hand-wavey and not terribly serious.
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What has Lunar regolith ever done to you; this is starting to sound like it’s personal.
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Cave had so many wise words to live by:
When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! GET MAD!
‘I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?’ Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons!
Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
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Lunar regolith killed my family - someday I will get my revenge.
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Did it have 6 studs on the left brick?
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Anyway, I think the important thing here is that there were all sorts of smart people working on this but somehow none of them came up with the idea of calling it lunar legolith.
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Reminds of that, pretty good, Cory Doctorow novella.
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