Advertisement

Space brick twice as strong as concrete is made from potatoes and salt

University of Manchester scientists have created a new material, dubbed 'StarCrete', which is made from extra-terrestrial dust, potato starch, and salt - and could be used to build homes on Mars.

Building infrastructure in space is currently prohibitively expensive and difficult to achieve. Future space construction will need to rely on simple materials that are easily available to astronauts - and StarCrete offers one possible solution.

The scientists behind the invention used simulated Martian soil mixed with potato starch and a pinch of salt to create a material that is twice as strong as ordinary concrete and is perfectly suited for construction work in extra-terrestrial environments.

In an article published in the journal Open Engineering, the research team demonstrated that ordinary potato starch can act as a binder when mixed with simulated Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material.

When tested, StarCrete had a compressive strength of 72 Megapascals (MPa), which is over twice as strong as the 32 MPa seen in ordinary concrete. StarCrete made from moon dust was even stronger at over 91 MPa. These results improve on previous work from the same team where they used astronauts' blood and urine as a binding agent.

Dr Aled Roberts explained, "Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood. Also, current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment which all adds cost and complexity to a mission. StarCrete doesn't need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible."