NASA Awards $57M Contract to Build Roads on the Moon

I wonder if it would be worth it to set up a mid/high frequency vibration device up to the moon and just run it for a few months? Years? To cause vibrational contact erosion in the immediate environs of wherever you intend to land to soften up the shards... Would that even work?

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/2...

> One dousing with dust was enough to make a deep impression on Schmitt. Back on Earth he opined that "the dust issue is one that just has to be addressed. It's going to be the major environmental issue for future missions to the Moon."

Such deposits of rocks with very high content of silicon dioxide, like sands, are formed on Earth by the action of water, which dissolves the more alkaline oxides from the rocks, leaving sand made mostly of quartz. There are no such sands on the Moon.

However, I have not mentioned above that besides sintering, there is an alternative way of making solids from lunar dust and rocks, which is to melt them completely and cast them into solid blocks.

However, this would be more difficult than sintering, because it must be done inside a sealed space, filled with some gas (materials do not melt in vacuum, they sublimate), and it would require a greater energy.

When introducing in the sealed space and extracting from it the raw materials and the end products, there would be some losses of the pressuring gas. Nevertheless, when melting rocks made of oxides, unlike when melting metals, the gas could be oxygen extracted from the lunar rocks, so its losses would not be important.

However, the use of oxygen as the working gas would make difficult to find a material from which to make the walls and the casting die, because such a material would have to resist both oxygen and melted oxides at high temperatures, which few materials are able to do, except some platinum-group metals, but even those do not last forever and need periodic replacements.

"Concrete" normally refers to rocks that are bound with cement, without having to use high temperature and/or pressure.

The paper does not explain how such a cement could be made from lunar rocks.

The Portland cement and most other usual cements, which are used on Earth, require water, which is not available in most places on the Moon.

What could be done is to extract the calcium oxide (quicklime), or other similar oxides, e.g. magnesia or yttria, from the lunar rocks.

Without water, these oxides cannot be used to make cement, i.e. a binder that becomes solid without applying high temperature or pressure, but due to chemical reactions at low temperature.

Nevertheless, these oxides can be used as binders in making ceramics, by sintering at a high temperature and moderate pressure, like making bricks on Earth.

Thus one can make ceramics or glass on the Moon, which should be the cheapest materials, but not cement or concrete. There is no chance of making a building by pouring concrete, like on Earth. It should be possible to make a building from bricks, which might have shapes holding them together, but which must also use some metal parts, e.g. bolts or rivets, to ensure that they stay in place, in the absence of cement that could be applied like on Earth.

It might be possible to seal the spaces between ceramic bricks with some kind of easily fusible glass, to make them airtight.

It is well understood that the only reasons ESA and JAXA in particular don't have crewed spacecraft is a lack of need, as both are clearly capable of developing reliable rockets and having supplied modules for the ISS are also clearly capable of designing spacecraft that can keep humans alive.

If India wants its Lunar infrastructure in the hypothetical case where the West somehow has already fully colonized it before India has had a chance to establish and maintain its own colony, perhaps India too should put aside its greed and seek to work through things via mutual cooperation?