[Cincinatus' Wife]

Mining and Manufacturing on the Moon***Resource utilization will play an important role in the establishment and support of a permanently manned lunar base. The identification of new and innovative technologies will insure the success, sustainability and growth of a future lunar base. These new technologies will certainly utilize lunar resources. Lunar resources can be used to supply replenishables such as oxygen, fuel, water and construction materials. These materials would otherwise have to be brought from Earth at considerable expense.

Lunar resources include oxygen from the lunar soil, water from the poles and a supply of volatile gases. One of the most significant steps towards self-sufficiency and independence from the Earth will be the use of lunar materials for construction.

At least seven major potential lunar construction materials have been identified. These include:

· concrete
· sulfur concrete
· cast basalt
· sintered basalt
· fiberglass
· cast glass
· metals

All of these materials may be used to construct a future lunar base. The basalt materials can be formed out of lunar regolith (soil) by a simple process of heating and cooling, and are the most likely to be used to build the first bases. ***

[sam_paine]

Why not use lunar concrete for interplanetary spaceship hulls? There could be thin steel or poly pressure badder inside, but just a thought. Seems like steel reinforced concrete might even be a little safer out there in all the solar radiation? Plus it doesn't take as much energy to create as does steel or aluminum.

Regular concrete weighs about 150 lbs/cuft and aluminum weighs about 165 lbs/cuft on earth. (Steel is about 500).

So steel on the moon weighs about 1/2 what aluminum weighs here, and concrete (by volume) would only weigh 25 lbs/cuft. Obviously, you need more volume of concrete to make stuff, and you need a lotta steel in it to get tensile strength, but for compressive qualities and raw sheilding, it's pretty good stuff, right? They're always making canoes out of it at the Universities....!