Can basalt-reinforced plastic hold air on Mars?
Channel: Orion Lawlor
Date: 2020-05-31

I pressure-test a basalt fiber reinforced thin sheet of clear plastic, to see if it could hold air in a tube habitat for growing plants on Mars.  The clear sheet used here is actually a thermal laminating pouch, normally used to hold paper, but here I've sealed in crossing strands of basalt fiber using a normal thermal laminator.

In this video I add two 3D printed endcaps to the clear sheet, and pressure test it up to 1 bar (14 psi, 100kPa above ambient).  Both the sheet and the 3D printed endcaps seem to have no problem holding this pressure, but the double sided duct tape that I used to connect them slowly slid apart.  With a better mechanical connection between the endcaps, this basalt-reinforced plastic approach seems viable to make tubes and domes on Mars!

Pictured inside the tube: a minifig Abe Lincoln and some very confused weeds from my driveway.

Basalt is common on Earth, Mars, as well as various moons and asteroids, so basalt fiber (basically melted stretched basalt) can be made cheaply with solar power anywhere in our solar system.  Clear plastic is a bit harder, but there's nothing but carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in this polymer sheet (PET sealed with LDPE), so it should be possible to make from Mars' CO2 atmosphere and H2O ice.  The clear plastic sheet will need a UV protective layer on top, probably a clear thin metal oxide film.  Solar and cosmic radiation will punch right through a thin sheet like this, but plants are incredibly radiation tolerant (much more than animals), so unless there's a solar storm you can probably ignore space radiation as far as plants are concerned (if the farmers can't handle the radiation, you probably need a farmbot robot).

This is part of the "Nexus Aurora" project, an open source space project.   https://www.reddit.com/r/NexusAurora/
Nearly this entire design is due to Sean Wessels (@MaNaeSWolf), I just built a prototype.