On Monday, privately held industrial engineering and construction giant Bechtel announced it is partnering with two universities in the U.S. Midwest to develop lunar infrastructure technologies.
The partnership is part of a NASA award backed by $2 million in funding for Colorado School of Mines and Missouri S&T which the space agency announced late last month.
“Bechtel started as a frontier company more than 120 years ago,” said Mike Costas, general manager of Bechtel’s Defense and Space business line. “Now, we’re thinking about the next frontier. What will it take to build permanent infrastructure on the Moon? What an exciting time.”
The team at Colorado School of Mines, led by principal investigator Christopher Dreyer, will seek to develop robotically constructed landing pads for the lunar surface, an approach that could provide a blueprint for more efficient construction on the moon’s surface using autonomous building technologies for human habitation and other permanent structures.
The Missouri S&T team, led by principal investigator Leslie Gertsch, will develop in-situ resource utilization techniques allowing lunar astronauts to harvest supplies from minerals already present on the moon’s surface. The team will use magnetic and electrostatic technologies to more efficiently separate calcium and aluminum-containing minerals from the moon’s soil, called regolith, to extract anorthite, a type of feldspar whose calcium and magnesium components can be used to make manufacturing equipment.
“We’ll be testing our processes in air and in a vacuum, and in cold and hot temperatures that mimic lunar conditions,” Dr. Gertsch, a professor of geological engineering at Missouri S&T, said in an announcement of the project. “We’ll use simulated regolith that is the best estimate of what lunar soils are like.
“If we can make the processes effective enough and efficient enough that we can get the materials to build what we need on the moon, then we will have made a huge step forward in actually sustainably living and working in space,” Gertsch added.
NASA awarded grants to three schools under the Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) program. The third academic institution awarded is Auburn University, which will focus on development of electronics suitable for very low-temperature environments, a project for which Bechtel is not actively working.
“Tackling the challenge of building on the Moon will require the know-how of what’s already been done in Earth’s harshest environments – extreme cold, extreme dust, higher radioactivity – combined with new thinking and approaches,” Costas said. “This is a perfect opportunity to collaborate.”
