ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet ESA's space brick has landed in LEGO® stores, but you can't buy the 3D-printed items to add to your own creations. We visited the Leicester Square Lego store in central London to check out the brick, which arrived at the end of June. It can be found on the top floor of the store, lurking at the back of what Lego calls the " …
Sorry to inform you guys, but a LEGO moonbase has already been made :
Given they made it from meteorite "combined with polylactide and regolith simulant" that does sound slightly less expensive.
It's like a certain company that sells "Welsh Gold" which turns out to mostly consist of the shiny-stuff sourced from the international market, with only a tiny proportion from the land of Ivor the Engine.
> Scientists and engineers have long studied In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) as a way of building a settlement on the Moon without having to transport all the material from Earth.
Oh sure, you wouldn't have to transport the materials there, true enough.
You just have to transport the machinery, energy production facilities, tools, and additive materials required to use the local resources. And the labour to use them, whether automated or biological. And of course also the machinery, labour, tools, etc. to then use whatever the aforementioned machines produce, provided they don't break down. Oh, that reminds me, you also need replacement parts for all these thingamabobs, and a way to keep the crew alive long enough until whatever survival-critical things are to be provided by ISRU actually can be provided by it.
Kinda reminds me of the old "How to draw an owl" tutorial:
And your alternative to ISRU is? (Waits for tumble weeds to pass by and crickets to stop chirping).
If anyone is trying to plan a way to have a long-term presence off the Earth, then they are still going to need to to haul up all the power generation and other machinery and bulk materials required. The difference between ISRU or not is in the mix of kit taken, not on the basic issue of lifting it all in the first place, and in the expected amount of resupply as the months, years and decades go by (we said long-term!).
> way to keep the crew alive long enough until whatever survival-critical things are to be provided by ISRU actually can be provided by it.
As with the brick example, the starting point for bulk ISRU is usually building materials, be that weird and wonderful ideas like turning regolith into load-bearing walls or just using lots of it all piled up to provide radiation shielding. And, just like building back on Earth, the ones doing the building are housed elsewhere and they, or someone else, only move in once the property is livable. So if they fail miserably to make the ISRU building work the first then they rely, as they have the whole time, on the systems they brought with them. And then abort the plans to stay longer and/or bring in more crew to use the completed buildings.
The same basic logic applies to other ISRU - e.g. using local water supplies. If it all works then they continue on, if not they abort and slink back home. At no time are they risking relying on the ISRU until it is ready (barring the sort of incident that goes way outside the plan and then calls for heroic efforts & actions).
Whether or not a long-term human presence off-Earth is actually feasible or desirable is entirely another matter. But people are always going to be having a go at planning for it - if only because it is a large engineering challenge and can be used to practice on.
> You just have to transport [long list]
There is a cut-off point where sending up machinery is more efficient than sending up individual ready-made buildings.
Obviously if you just need 1 or 2 shelters, it's cheaper to send them up all ready-made. But for a small settlement it's clearly more efficient to send up the machinery to build all the buildings right there (assuming you can mostly use local materials).
(Didn't downvote you though.)
Manufacturing bricks is a solved problem, you don't need a 3d printer, you need a brick press".
Can bricks not be made the old fashioned way on the moon out of lunar regolith, saving the 3d printer resources for things more difficult?
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