Culture
How to Build a House on Mars Using Only Materials on Mars
Turns out mixing Martian soil with sulfur produces a strong and quick-drying concrete.
Try building a house without any of the materials mere Earthlings use to build houses.
That’s the challenge facing astronauts as they move forward with colonizing Mars. They’ll either need to bring materials with them, which will be wildly expensive and generally unreliable (what if you need a spare part?), or make use of the Red Planet’s rugged, inhospitable terrain. NASA recently rewarded a design for a 3-D-printed ice house as a promising use of Martian water deposits to make a safe, radiation-proof habitation. But water will be scarce and better used for sustaining the lives of the space settlers.