PLASTIC FANTASTIC
Lunar Legos? Far out, man.
By Plasteurope.com staff
“Fly me to the moon,” Danish toymaker Lego has been singing recently, among those who want to build astronaut shelters and launchpads on the moon in the future. Abundant lunar dust is the ideal construction material, but can bricks be moulded from it? The European Space Agency (ESA) has put this to the test earthside with studded Lego-like bricks 3D-printed from meteorite dust (a stand-in for the moonstuff) – ESA Space Bricks – and sure enough, their clamping force defies weightlessness.
But it doesn’t work entirely without plastics: a small amount of PLA is part of the space-dust mixture.
“Fly me to the moon,” Danish toymaker Lego has been singing recently, among those who want to build astronaut shelters and launchpads on the moon in the future. Abundant lunar dust is the ideal construction material, but can bricks be moulded from it? The European Space Agency (ESA) has put this to the test earthside with studded Lego-like bricks 3D-printed from meteorite dust (a stand-in for the moonstuff) – ESA Space Bricks – and sure enough, their clamping force defies weightlessness.
But it doesn’t work entirely without plastics: a small amount of PLA is part of the space-dust mixture.
 That’s clutch: galactic building blocks made from the moon, for the moon (Photo: Lego) |
Now only a few brick-clicks separate us from a Legoland Moon Resort – or are we getting ahead of ourselves? Regardless, it is probably only a matter of time before other brick manufacturers follow suit with lunar property projects. Stargazers, watch out: if you see a waning moon in the near future, it could be because the large-scale mining of lunar dust is gnawing away at the profile of our Earth’s satellite.
— Translated by Andru Shively
16.08.2024 Plasteurope.com [255881-0]
Published on 16.08.2024