Manchester scientists have created a new material called StarCrete, made from alien dust, potato starch and a pinch of salt, which could be used to build houses on Mars.
At present, building infrastructure in space is expensive and difficult to achieve. Future space construction will need to rely on simple materials easily available to astronauts, and StarCrete offers a possible solution. The scientists behind the invention used simulated Martian soil mixed with potato starch and a pinch of salt to create a material twice as strong as ordinary concrete, ideal for construction work in alien environments.
In an article published in the journal Open Works, the team demonstrated that ordinary potato starch can act as a binder when mixed with simulated Martian dust to produce a concrete-like material. When tested, StarCrete had a compressive strength of 72 megapascals (MPa), more than double the 32 MPa found in normal concrete. Stargust made from lunar dust is even stronger, exceeding 91 MPa.
The work improves on previous work by the same team, which used astronauts' blood and urine as a binder. Although the compressive strength of the resulting material is about 40 MPa, which is better than that of ordinary concrete, the disadvantage of this process is that it requires regular blood. When operating in a hostile environment like space, this option is considered less viable than using potato starch.
"Since we will produce starch as food for astronauts, it makes sense to think of it as a binder rather than human blood.". In addition, current construction technologies still require years of development, requiring large amounts of energy and additional heavy processing equipment, all of which add to the cost and complexity of the task. StarCrete doesn't need that, so it simplifies the task, making it cheaper and more feasible.
"In any case, astronauts may not want to live in a house made of scabs and urine," said Dr. Aled Roberts, a researcher at the Future Biomanufacturing Research Center and principal investigator of the project.
The team calculated that one (25kg) bag of dehydrated potatoes (potato chips) contained enough starch to produce nearly half a tonne of StarCrete, which equates to more than 213 bricks of material. By comparison, a three-bedroom house takes about 7,500 bricks to build. In addition, they found that a common salt, magnesium chloride, which can be obtained from the surface of Mars or from the tears of astronauts, significantly improved the strength of StarCrete. The next phase of the
project is to turn StarCrete from a lab into an app. DeakinBio, a start-up recently formed by Dr Roberts and his team, is exploring ways to improve StarCrete so that it can also be used in terrestrial environments.
If used on Earth, StarCrete can provide a greener alternative to traditional concrete. Cement and concrete account for about 8% of global carbon monoxide.2 Emissions as a manufacturing process require very high combustion temperatures and energy. StarCrete, on the other hand, can be made in a regular oven or microwave at normal "home bake" temperatures, reducing production energy costs.
More information: Aled D. Roberts et al., StarCrete: Starch-Based Biocomposites for Outworld Architecture, Open Engineering (2023). DOI： 10.1515/eng-2022-0390
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