Extraterrestrial Construction Using Contour Crafting

Most proposals for construction of settlements on Moon and Mars are based on transporting structural elements from Earth and assembling them at the destination. A far less expensive and potentially practical approach is using Contour Crafting, a large-scale AM process, in conjunction with in-situ materials. Our trials with sulfur based concrete and sintered lunar regolith simulant made by NASA show strong promise. Our project ultimately aims at demonstration of lunar outpost infrastructure construction involving landing pads, blast walls, roads, shade walls and protective hangars. This paper reports on our very early efforts in the first stage of the project.Mechanical Engineerin