Plants are the factories of nature, transforming the minerals and water in the soil into functional organic matter, such as fibres and cellulose; they can be exploited as a natural processing system, economical and efficient, to produce the materials for construction out of organic material. There is strong evidence that regolith-based agriculture can be implemented [1], allowing this manufacturing paradigm to be exploited on the lunar surface. From an engineering perspective, building a permanent settlement on the lunar surface poses several challenges. One of these is the procurement of large components, which are uneconomical to launch from Earth and should be fabricated in place. Moreover, in the first stages of base-building, where robotic precursor missions are supposed to lay the foundations of the settlement (which is not yet inhabited), these processes need to be fully automated. The idea we propose is to use vegetable fibres to produce complex and scalable production systems. Starting from a precursor mission equipped with a small 3D printer, it is possible to fabricate modules that can be assembled on the 3D printer itself by a robot. This process allows for the 3D printer to “grow” in size, using only plant matter grown in-situ as the printed material. The growth is limited by the structural stability required for the machine to operate, but due to the Moon’s low gravity and the fact that 3D printers exert little force during operation, these limits are less stringent than on Earth. This paradigm can be extended to other constructive tools such as machining, albeit with some sharper limitations. Milestones: - Production of fibre-based material, - Design of the 3D printed modules, - Automatic assembly of the modules to demonstrate feasibility. [1] Wamelink, G.W.W., Frissel, J.Y., Krijnen, W.H.J., Verwoert, M.R., Goedhart, P.W. “Can plants grow on mars and the moon: A growth experiment on mars and moon soil simulants” (2014) PLoS ONE, 9 (8), art. no. e103138.
