With NASA planning a crewed lunar landing as soon as 2025, there’s questions about how to best build longer term shelters for humans on the Moon.
One scientist who is taking this question seriously is Monika Stankiewicz. She’s a PhD student in Lunar architecture at the University of Adelaide, and she’s focused on how to build structures using bricks made of lunar dirt.
“My life keeps coming back to bricks. I played with Lego bricks as a kid, then my first job out of out of my bachelor’s degree was at Austral Bricks working in the brick factory,” says Stankiewicz.
“When I found out that space architecture is a field and I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so cool. I want to go there’.
“Then got to my capstone project, which is what this is about, which is also about bricks as basically an alternative way of building regolith shelters on the moon.”
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Originally published by Cosmos as Meet Adelaide’s ‘space brickie’
Jacinta Bowler
Jacinta Bowler is a science journalist at Cosmos. They have an undergraduate degree in genetics and journalism from the University of Queensland and have been published in the Best Australian Science Writing 2022.
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