Astroport Space Technologies, a San Antonio space construction and materials company, has one ambitious goal for the end of this decade: be the first one to make a brick on the moon.
Through its Artemis program, NASA is sending astronauts back to the moon, setting the foundation for an eventual lunar base and sustained human presence on the moon’s South Pole.
The space agency is relying on private companies, universities and research institutes — including several in San Antonio — to work out important engineering challenges that come with construction on the moon.
At Astroport, located at Port San Antonio, engineers are designing an autonomous rover, what they call Brickbot, capable of turning moon dirt into bricks that will form the foundations of rocket landing pads, human habitats and roads.
The company’s broader goal, its founder and CEO Sam Ximenes said, is to make moon base construction a manufacturing and research niche for San Antonio as NASA expands its footprint across Texas — a “lunar surface supply chain” from San Antonio to the moon.
“We want to make San Antonio known for lunar construction,” Ximenes said.
San Antonio and Artemis
With the help of private space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, NASA plans to land humans on the moon in 2028, something the space agency hasn’t done since the last Apollo mission in 1972. In April, NASA sent four astronauts on a flyby of the moon as part of the second Artemis mission.
If successful, the Artemis missions will be the starting point for a sustained human presence and base on the moon’s South Pole by 2032. The longer term goal is establishing a framework for colonizing Mars around mid-century, what NASA refers to as its Moon-to-Mars initiative.
There’s a long list of scientific and engineering challenges to overcome in order to make the moon base a reality, and several San Antonio organizations have been awarded NASA contracts to assist.
That includes Southwest Research Institute, which in collaboration with Astroport plans to build a 180-acre lunar testing yard in San Antonio resembling the geography of the moon base.
The site would offer a full-scale testing site for Astroport and other organizations to test equipment and construction materials before they’re hauled into space. SwRI is still seeking funding for the project.
Local universities are also involved.
UTSA researchers are studying how lunar bricks hold up under extreme temperatures like those generated during rocket launches and landings; analyzing Apollo lunar soil samples to help NASA find frozen water on the moon’s South Pole; and using computer simulations to look at how lunar habitats might withstand moonquakes, temperature swings, meteorite impacts and the reduced gravity environment.
At St. Mary’s University, researchers aim to better understand how lunar regolith — the mixture of dust and rock fragments that coats the moon’s surface — might complicate construction on the moon.
Using $50,000 in prize money from NASA, a team led by computer engineering professor Carol Redfield and engineering professor Parker Shectman will build a custom 5-foot transparent vacuum chamber used to run simulations on how the regolith moves and interacts with different equipment.
Their findings could be used to train the astronauts (and robots) who will be handling and living with the regolith, the researchers explained.
“Any type of civil infrastructure work that we do here on Earth, like building a road, building a highway, a railroad, mixing concrete, all of that stuff … simply handling the stuff figures into it,” Shectman said. “So one of the purposes of both the simulations and the experiments is to develop that intuition. What can astronauts or even robots expect when moving this stuff around?”
The WEX Foundation, Astroport’s nonprofit STEM education arm, also hosts several programs aimed at promoting science and technology curriculum for K-12 students.
Kathryn Bolish, an Astroport project manager and STEM curriculum developer for WEX, said that kids get hands-on experience in real experiments, like flying a high-altitude balloon carrying a lunar regolith brick into the stratosphere to understand how well the material shields against radiation.
“All the partners Astroport has developed, we ask them what skills they’re missing, what jobs they are looking to hire, and then we teach the students those skills to give them a direct pipeline into these industries to keep them here in San Antonio,” Bolish said.
Lunar masonry
Astroport’s mission is important because bringing construction materials from Earth is expensive and complicated. NASA favors “in situ resource utilization” or ISRU, the use of materials already on the lunar surface.
“You talk about sustainability and recycling here on Earth, the moon is the ultimate test bed … use case for how to do recycling, how to do sustainment as well,” Ximenes said. “Nothing’s going to be wasted.”
That attitude is present in the Astroport lab, too.
The team is currently designing and building a Brickbot rover prototype, the finished version of which will be able to autonomously excavate lunar regolith, sift it and turn it into a brick using a specially built high temperature furnace. You can currently find an old PlayStation controller and empty yogurt cartons inside the Brickbot prototype.
“Our (chief technology officer), he’s working with our laser over there, he loves peach yogurt,” Bolish said. “You’d be surprised at how useful recycling things like that are in a lab environment like this.”
Astroport’s goal is to land a Brickbot rover on the moon by 2029 and be the first to demonstrate its autonomous lunar masonry technology.
The company does have competition: most notably, China, which is working on the same engineering problem and seeking to land its own crewed spacecraft on the moon before the U.S.
If Astroport succeeds, it plans to eventually make 200,000 regolith bricks on the moon.
“(Humanity has) been making construction with bricks for eons,” Ximenes said. “Wherever we go, we’re going to be using bricks.”
