With NASA's sights on moon bases, the question becomes how do you build shelters for tomorrow's lunar inhabitants? Carting up large amounts of raw materials from Earth is prohibitively expensive. And the only resources on the surface are regolith—lunar dust—and water. Fortunately, that's all mushrooms need, leading to NASA exploring fungi as the future of lunar construction. A far out idea, but the agency's Mycotecture Off Planet project recently received additional funding to continue.
Not only does "mycomaterial" exhibit extraordinary strength, it can also be an effective shield against radiation even more effectively than regolith. NASA is partnering with Cleveland-based architecture firm redhouse on the effort.
Form Al Jazeera:
Mycotecture – the use of fungal-based materials for constructive purposes – has been a growing trend in recent years, and has been used in everything from art to building to "biocycling" waste.
[Chris] Maurer's firm has already been applying it to confront challenges here on Earth. In Namibia, for example, redhouse runs a programme that uses mycomaterial to build housing for climate refugees while simultaneously growing edible mushrooms to address food scarcity issues[…]
Previously:
• Scientists create a robot controlled by living mushroom. See the fungus that learned to crawl
• An astonishing atlas of mushroom colors
• Mushrooming made easy. Really easy
