There are many Lego sets with astronauts. But now there are Lego bricks made from what astronauts find in space.
A Danish manufacturer has teamed up with the European Space Agency (ESA) to make Lego parts from real meteorite dust . Cool, right? Until September 20, they will be displayed in several Lego stores, including a large branch on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, writes Engadget.
This project is not just for fun, although it is a lot of fun. It's a proof-of-concept that showshow astronauts could use lunar dust to build lunar structures. Think of the enormous amount of energy and money required to transport building materials from Earth to the Moon. Instead, it would be very convenient to build everything from already available lunar materials.
On the surface of the moon there is a layer of rocks and mineral deposits, which is called the lunar regolith. It was long believed that regolith would be needed to build our first off-planet colonies. It is readily available, and there are several promising methods of converting it into building materials. After all, people have been building structures out of mud, soil, and sand for thousands of years.
However, there is not much lunar regolith on Earth to experiment with. ESA scientists created their own regolith by crushing a very old meteorite. Dust from this meteorite was turned into a mixture that was used to 3D print Lego parts. Voila! Moon bricks. They are connect together just like regular Lego bricks, although they only come in one color (space gray, apparently).
No one has built structures on the moon, so it was great to have the flexibility to try out all kinds of designs and construction methods with our Space Bricks. It was both fun and useful for scientific understanding of the limits of these methods,
said ESA scientist Aidan Cowley.
Humanity is actually getting closer than ever to our first real moon base. NASA has teamed up with the Italian space agency and space corporation Thales Alenia to build the first permanent human outpost on the moon, although that won't happen until at least the 2030s. Recent projects of lunar dwellings range from something similar to a mobile home to full-fledged inflatable villages.