In an October 25, 2022 UCF report, Associate Professor Ranajay Ghosh and his Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering team said 3D-printed bricks made from lunar regolith and saltwater could be used to construct an Artemis Base Camp. The work used binder jet technology in UCF’s COSMOS Lab, with regolith simulant from UCF’s Exolith Lab; bricks baked at up to 1200 degrees Celsius withstood pressure up to 250 million times Earth’s atmosphere.
Technically, the result supports in-situ resource utilization: using lunar soil as structural feedstock instead of shipping heavy construction materials from Earth. That is strategically important for lunar habitation because it lowers logistics cost, enables larger fixed shelters, and supports durable radiation- and vacuum-adjacent infrastructure for long-duration human presence.
Ark priority: track whether this process scales from laboratory cylinders to full structural elements, whether the saltwater binder can be replaced or recovered using lunar resources, and whether the method integrates with Artemis South Pole construction plans. The Ark should also compare this approach against sintering, sulfur concrete, and regolith geopolymer methods for mass, energy demand, and thermal performance.