Building Habitable Structures on the Moon

A storage space being constructed by a Contour Crafting robot housed on a version of the Athlete rover developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

fastcodesign.com—Building a house usually involves transporting many materials from distant locations for the construction so you can imagine the difficulties of building say, your vacation house on the moon.

USC Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture), and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) completed their first visualization for their NASA research grant for a system to do exactly that.

Using a technique called contour crafting, they propose sending robots to seed the surface of the moon with the basic infrastructure for a moon base (landing pads, roads, hangars, etc.). Once the construction is completed, human crew could lift off and move into their new home.

Contour crafting is effectively a form of 3-D printing. A robot arm extrudes concrete while automated trowels smooth the material into place. On earth, the promise it gives is low-cost, individually customized house construction--the same promises that 3-D printers give to object creation, but on an architectural scale.

On the moon, the basic idea is enhanced fully mobile crafting bots and by on-site quarrying and processing—as it turns out, moon rock has almost all the basic ingredients for concrete. “We will melt the lunar sand and rocks and extrude, the same way some rocks are made naturally on earth from volcanic lava,” says Dr. Khoshnevis.