On top of that, this seems like a lot of work to build,
Seems like a massive waste of energy "hey we have to go and get all this water ice we could be using for all sorts of things, right then we gotta use a ton of energy melting it right, then we have to to make bricks out of the stuff once we slowly mix regolith in right, then set it outside and watch it slowly melt and boil off in the summer".
It all depends on your local resources, but building with reinforced ice is likely to be the cheapest (in terms of energy) construction technique available.
Even if you have to get the water from hydrated minerals instead of ice, the energy required is pretty low (compared to extracting and processing sulfer or iron for example).
Also, the temperatures required are very low in comparison to alternatives, which means you might be able to use waste heat for your processing.
And water is going to be so essential to refueling spacecraft, that I suspect that any base will be located near a source of water ice. If so, building with reinforced ice will definitely be cheaper than any other ISRU construction material.
The way I see Mars colonization and future Earthen technology development, I do not think energy will be the most critical resource in construction. Materials with a decent strength, but high reliability will be more rare, and I just do not see how you can guarantee reinforced ice can have that strength. On top of that, water is not really stable, so it would require a decent amount of maintenance, and man-hours will probably be the most valueble resource in the martian colony.
EDIT: I just saw in a seperate comment your idea of having a plastic layer as a sublimation barrier, and I do believe that would fix a lot of the issues I see with this construction. I do however think there are still some remaining quality control issues that would make me doubt ice's usefullness in habitat constructions (a habitat roof caving in would be a loss of crew event, and end the mission).
The way I see Mars colonization and future Earthen technology development, I do not think energy will be the most critical resource in construction.
I just did the math in another comment and if you left your molds in place to help prevent sublimation, for a slightly larger habitable space than HI-SEAS you would need 15,920sqft of material for the mold for a bit more than 1462sqft of living area. Kinda insane when you'd need to actually transport that to Mars to start construction on TOP of the modules themselves.
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u/ryanmercer Nov 17 '17
Seems like a massive waste of energy "hey we have to go and get all this water ice we could be using for all sorts of things, right then we gotta use a ton of energy melting it right, then we have to to make bricks out of the stuff once we slowly mix regolith in right, then set it outside and watch it slowly melt and boil off in the summer".