- Were these really the only available options?
Space is the place to be. That’s what it sure seems like when you look at all the plans to colonize the moon, Mars, and other distant chunks of rock.
Once we do manage to leave Earth, however, the brave space colonists will need houses. And building space housing is currently proving to be a bit of a problem.
First of all, the concrete materials we use on Earth weigh too much for feasible space transportation. Additionally, the concrete may be unable to deal with extreme temperatures and other adverse conditions on foreign planets.
But we don’t have to abandon our spacefaring dreams just yet. After all, two scientists have developed a new, much stronger and more durable concrete.
And it’s based on potato starch.
That’s a bit of a strange building material, but it beats the alternative proposal — which uses human blood as a component.
An Out-of-This-World Material
The new material has been appropriately titled Starcrete. According to the researcher duo behind this miracle material, it addresses several issues regular concrete faces in space.
Most significantly, concrete — or more specifically, the materials necessary to mix concrete — is heavy. When you’re trying to get to space, you want to keep things as light as possible because every pound of added bulk on a spacecraft eats up a lot of extra fuel.
Potato starch, however, doesn’t weigh much and produces a fair bit of Starcrete. The researchers state that 55 pounds of dehydrated potatoes (essentially, potato chips) could produce 200 Starcrete bricks.
To put that into perspective, a three-bedroom house requires roughly 7,500 bricks.
That’s not an insignificant amount of starch, but that leads us to Starcrete’s second benefit. Potatoes are easy to grow, and a decent potato farm could supply astronauts with both food and construction materials.
Finally, Starcrete is very strong. The scientists created test bricks using simulated Martian and lunar soil, and the results certainly seem promising.
For comparison, regular concrete can withstand 32 Megapascals of pressure before it cracks. Starcrete manufactured with Martian soil can take 72 Megapascals, while lunar Starcrete won’t break until it comes under 91 Megapascals of pressure.
That means that at its worst, Starcrete is more than twice as strong as regular concrete. Not bad for something bound together by potatoes.
Better than Blood
However, potato starch isn’t the only binder researchers have suggested using on other planets. There have been many proposals, some of them more reasonable than others.
One alternative, however, is weird, gross, and disturbing in equal measure. After all, it’s based on human blood.
Well, not necessarily just blood. You could also feed the concrete-making process with urine.
In this process, either blood or pee would be mixed into the concrete to act as a binder, like potato starch with Starcrete. And to be fair, the resulting concrete is admittedly strong.
The logic behind using blood is that it has a theoretically infinite supply. As long as the astronauts don’t, you know, kick the bucket, they can keep feeding their crimson or yellow fluids into the concrete mill.
Just Add Tears
This whole concept of regular bloodletting to build houses has understandably been a hard sell. Not only is the idea off-putting but it does have serious downsides.
The most significant disadvantage is that astronauts need their blood to… Well, live. If you’ve ever donated blood, you know that the doctors will tell you to take it easy for a while because you can get seriously woozy from the blood loss.
That can be an even greater issue on a foreign planet, where the (likely) hostile environment is already putting a lot of strain on your body. Consequently, what’s the point of building space houses if the process ends up killing everyone who would live in them?
Additionally, and we can’t stress this enough, the thought of living in a blood or piss house is disgusting. The creators of Starcrete underline this as well.
“Anyway, astronauts probably don’t want to be living in houses made from scabs and urine,” lead researcher Dr. Aled Roberts said in a statement.
However, Starcrete does need one ingredient that might be sourced from the astronauts. The material’s strength relies on magnesium chloride, a common salt.
In most cases, the foreign planet’s soil would likely have enough magnesium chloride for it to not become a problem. However, if necessary, it can be harvested from human tears.
Basically, you can have astronauts cry tears of joy into the cement mixer since they don’t have to live in a house built of blood.