BEIJING: China is expected to push forward in its quest to build the first lunar base on Friday, launching an in-space experiment to test whether the station’s bricks could be made from the Moon’s own soil.
Brick samples will blast off aboard a cargo rocket heading for China’s Tiangong space station, part of Beijing’s mission to put humans on the Moon by 2030 and build a permanent base there by 2035.
It is a daunting task: any structure has to withstand huge amounts of cosmic radiation, extreme temperature variations and moonquakes, and getting building materials there in the first place is a costly procedure.
Constructing the base out of the Moon itself could be a solution to those problems, scientists from a university in central Wuhan province hope. –Agencies
