He eats. NASA wants to go back to the moon — and build homes. Building materials made from mushrooms could help save trillions of dollars.
without Mushrooms Earth may never have been habitable. They began to spread from water to land about 500 million years ago. They penetrate the earth, breaking up its rocks and recycling its nutrients to create healthy soil in which plants and animals can thrive. Now you must also help unique creatures colonize moon Play a crucial role. The first habitable houses could grow from them on the Earth's satellite.
In a project funded by the US space agency NASA, scientists, architects and engineers are investigating how mushrooms could be used as building materials on the moon. This technology will also be used on Mars, which is further away, at some point. Compared with traditional building materials, mushrooms do not need to be transported in an expensive way. You can only grow there.
NASA: Mushrooms are said to grow with moon dust and water
“At the moment, traditional Mars house designs are like a tortoise – we carry our houses with us on our backs – a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs,” says one person. NASA press release Lynn Rothschild, early stage project manager. “Instead we can Misilia “We use them to plant these habitats ourselves when we get there.”
She said only recently NASA To the “Mycotecture Off Planet Structures at Destination” project for development. NASA sees the project as promising, and experiments in Earth orbit will soon follow. Because it is part of NASA's larger project to return to the moon: the Artemis program.
The Mushroom Project uses the philosophy of building with materials found only on the moon. The chosen ones Types of mushrooms It only needs water and water to grow Moon dustwhat is called regolith. They can be manipulated to form certain structures, Al Jazeera reported. These mushroom formations are said to be harder than concrete.
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Houses on the Moon: Surprisingly, mushrooms are stable as a building material
Mycotecture is the name of the underlying technology behind it. It has been used successfully for years to stabilize materials containing fungi in buildings. American architecture firm Redhouse is researching lunar houses made of mushrooms in collaboration with NASA, and is also producing its own mushroom “bricks” for use on Earth.
This is what they will do Mushrooms They are fed with organic matter such as plants, and the resulting structures are then treated with intense heat and pressed into blocks. A process that gives the material a high degree of stability, as Red House founder Chris Maurer explains to Al Jazeera.
“Force doesn't play a big role on the Moon or Mars because… attractiveness “It's much lower and the accumulated forces are directed outward because you're in a pressurized vessel,” Maurer says. “Instead of gravity putting pressure on your building, air is being pushed out. So you don't need a good material to resist pressure, but a tensile strength that can withstand that pressure.” So in space, buildings don't collapse, they collapse.
Read also: Asteroids as a danger? Launch of the European Space Agency's defense mission
NASA's revolutionary idea could save trillions of dollars
According to Al Jazeera, the plan is to start with an inflatable model containing fungal material using a mixture of Fungal spores Algae growing from Earth that feeds on water and regolith already on the Moon. A process that, according to Maurer, could save several trillion US dollars.
In addition to the amazing stability of the fungus, other properties also have a decisive advantage. So mushrooms are excellent Insulating material Against the cold in space. They also provide protection from small meteoroids and deadly radiation on the Moon's surface, which is one of the main reasons why humans have not returned to the Moon yet.
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According to NASA, the project envisions a future in which… Human explorers It could create a compact habitat made of lightweight material with dormant fungi that can survive long journeys to places like Mars. When the fungus arrives, it can grow into a fully functioning human habitat by simply opening the scaffold and adding water.
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