From the BZ editorial team
Will the ominous man in the moon soon have a roof over his head? Sounds crazy. It seems even crazier: His house is supposed to come from the 3D printer!
The Aerospace Institute of the Technical University of Berlin and the Laser Zentrum Hannover eV want to make it possible. Name of the crazy project: Moonrise.
La Le Lu, not only the moon, surely the whole world is watching when the moon mission is to start in two years, according to the ambitious plan of the makers.
What the researchers have already achieved in their laboratories under simulated lunar conditions will then be tried out on the moon 384,400 kilometers away: a robotic arm mounted on a moon rover, equipped with a camera and a special laser, is intended to melt powdered lunar rock (so-called regolith). – the raw material for 3D printing. This is controlled by the researchers on Earth using artificial intelligence.
Why this crazy sounding idea? The reason: 50 years after the end of the American “Apollo” program, a new race to the moon has broken out.
Because the lower gravity and the lack of an atmosphere make the moon an ideal way station for setting up missions to more distant targets in space.
Scientists from the TU Berlin and the Zentrum Hannover eV (LZH) simulate the melting of lunar rock into lunar dust Photo: Technical University
For this, launch pads, landing pads and buildings have to be built there. “With costs of up to one million dollars per kilogram, a complete transport of the material from earth to the moon would be extremely expensive,” explains Moonrise project manager Jörg Neumann.
This means that the buildings can be manufactured cheaply using 3D printing. And the material for it is lying on the moon’s soil for nothing!
Hard economic calculations are causing the USA, Russia, China, Europe, even South Korea, India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates to launch robotic missions to the Earth’s satellite this year. Everyone also wants to stake out claims for suspected mineral resources there.
And that requires the right infrastructure. However, the man in the moon would have been up there alone for the longest time.