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Scientists Created A Machine For Printing Houses On The Moon

The main problems that we face when were trying to colonise another planet, or the moon, is that our Mooninites are not going to have a place to live. Then we have the whole problem with gravitational forces, if you remember the videos of the astronauts jumping around and falling all over the place then you can see that building a home is going to be more of a hassle than anything else. Then you run into yet another problem, this one is a bit more economical than anything else, it is very expensive to lift things off the ground and throw them into space. The more material you need to send up there, the more prohibitively expensive your problem is. But lets say that Gingrich get’s elected as president and we must build a moon colony – How do we do it?

For starters, we can solve the whole “carrying supplies” problem by making the concrete out of the moon itself.  Then you send out robots that resemble large 3d printing machines and quite literally print out an entire military base. When the base is complete, THEN, you send out Gingrich to colonise it.

USC Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture), and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) completed their first robot to do exactly that. 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.

Check out the video above to see how all of this works out, now we just need to find a way to get this project in motion, OR we could use this same robot to help the people in Africa make houses, either way, this technology takes our dream of colonising other planets and moons a step closer to reality. [Fast Code Design]