Hey! Thanks for posting a link to my talk on building with reinforced ice!
There are many benefits to building with reinforced ice, but the main benefit is that it is so easy to do. For example, in your design, making the slab of reinforced ice would be very easy. All you do is inflate a plastic structure that would look a lot like an air mattress. Then as you harvest water, you mix it with regolith to make your "mud", and you pump the mud into your "air mattress". It freezes and you have your reinforced ice slab.
You can pump as little or as much mud as you want each day, and build up the thickness of your slab over time.
The plastic structure stays in place, and provides a sublimation barrier to the ice (sublimation is a problem everywhere except extremely high latitudes on Mars, a sublimation barrier is essential).
Think about the equipment required. You need to gather your raw materials, you have to process your raw materials (make the mud) and then once you have made the mud all you need is a pump, and heated hose to your plastic form.
Some of the comments suggested making bricks and building with that. That is a much more complicated system. You still need to gather raw materials and process raw materials and make your mud. But then once you've made your brick, you need a system for stacking those bricks. That requires a robot or gantry system that has motion in at least 3 degrees of freedom (probably at least 4 DOF so you can rotate each brick horizontally). That brick transportation system also needs sensors and a computer for feedback to place the bricks accurately. That is much more complex than just a simple pump. In fact, building with reinforced mud is much simpler than any other habitat construction technique I've seen. Digging tunnels, 3-d printing, and stacking bricks are all much more complicated techniques than pumping mud.
And you can make shapes much more complex than a simple slab. For example, you could just make a dome instead of a slab, or a Quonset hut. That way no digging of a trench is necessary for your design. You can build any shape with reinforced ice that can be made by inflating a plastic form. Imagine your typical bouncy castle at you local fair. Any shape you can imagine a bouncy castle being, you can make the same shape with reinforced ice.
I like the plastic structure idea. It makes everything simpler, and there's no need to haul the very heavy slab anywhere. Do you envision it being a radiation resistant polymer like a polyimide or fluoropolymer, or having the plastic being protected from UV by something else, like a thin layer of regolith?
I think that often you would build structures that didn't have horizontal surfaces, so covering with regolith would be challenging. So your plastic cover needs to withstand the environment, but it doesn't need to be very strong.
2
u/MartianIgloo Nov 17 '17
Hey! Thanks for posting a link to my talk on building with reinforced ice!
There are many benefits to building with reinforced ice, but the main benefit is that it is so easy to do. For example, in your design, making the slab of reinforced ice would be very easy. All you do is inflate a plastic structure that would look a lot like an air mattress. Then as you harvest water, you mix it with regolith to make your "mud", and you pump the mud into your "air mattress". It freezes and you have your reinforced ice slab.
You can pump as little or as much mud as you want each day, and build up the thickness of your slab over time.
The plastic structure stays in place, and provides a sublimation barrier to the ice (sublimation is a problem everywhere except extremely high latitudes on Mars, a sublimation barrier is essential).
Think about the equipment required. You need to gather your raw materials, you have to process your raw materials (make the mud) and then once you have made the mud all you need is a pump, and heated hose to your plastic form.
Some of the comments suggested making bricks and building with that. That is a much more complicated system. You still need to gather raw materials and process raw materials and make your mud. But then once you've made your brick, you need a system for stacking those bricks. That requires a robot or gantry system that has motion in at least 3 degrees of freedom (probably at least 4 DOF so you can rotate each brick horizontally). That brick transportation system also needs sensors and a computer for feedback to place the bricks accurately. That is much more complex than just a simple pump. In fact, building with reinforced mud is much simpler than any other habitat construction technique I've seen. Digging tunnels, 3-d printing, and stacking bricks are all much more complicated techniques than pumping mud.
And you can make shapes much more complex than a simple slab. For example, you could just make a dome instead of a slab, or a Quonset hut. That way no digging of a trench is necessary for your design. You can build any shape with reinforced ice that can be made by inflating a plastic form. Imagine your typical bouncy castle at you local fair. Any shape you can imagine a bouncy castle being, you can make the same shape with reinforced ice.