Manchester scientists have created a new material, dubbed ‘StarCrete’ which is made from extra-terrestrial dust, potato starch, and a pinch of salt and could be used to build homes on Mars. Building infrastructure in space is currently prohibitively expensive and difficult to achieve. Future spac
Starcrete sample. Researchers have found that mixing simulated Mars dust with ordinary potato starch creates a concrete-like material called StarCrete. In testing, StarCrete showed compressive strength of over twice that of ordinary concrete, with a strength of 72 Megapascals . The strength increased even further when using Moon dust, reaching over 91 MPa. Credit: Aled Roberts
This work improves on previous work from the same team where they used astronauts’ blood and urine as a binding agent. While the resulting material had a compressive strength of around 40 MPa, which is better than normal concrete, the process had the drawback of requiring blood on a regular basis. When operating in an environment as hostile as space, this option was seen as less feasible than using potato starch.
“And anyway, astronauts probably don’t want to be living in houses made from scabs and urine!” Dr. Aled Roberts, Research Fellow at the Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, and lead researcher for this project. The next stages of this project are to translate StarCrete from the lab to application. Dr. Roberts and his team have recently launched a start-up company, DeakinBio, which is exploring ways to improve StarCrete so that it could also be used in a terrestrial setting.
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