I bet on the Moon that dust behaves very different. No atmosphere, so no usual clouds. Static electricity, so some possible weird behavior. No erosion and soil, so dust is sharp and hard.
It would be interesting to see how road construction looks like on the Moon.
I wonder if it would be worth it to set up a mid/high frequency vibration device up to the moon and just run it for a few months? Years? To cause vibrational contact erosion in the immediate environs of wherever you intend to land to soften up the shards... Would that even work?
Love this. Very creative.
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/2...
> One dousing with dust was enough to make a deep impression on Schmitt. Back on Earth he opined that "the dust issue is one that just has to be addressed. It's going to be the major environmental issue for future missions to the Moon."
Nevertheless, it should be possible to sinter the dust into ceramic blocks, by moderate pressure and temperature, together with some kind of binder.
As a sintering aid that works as a binder, there are various oxides that could be extracted from moon rocks, e.g. yttria, though some of the more abundant oxides, e.g. of magnesium or calcium, might also work.
So I think that the most difficult part of making solids from moon dust or broken moon rocks is the extraction from the rocks of the oxides that can be used as binders for sintering.
Sintering has the great advantage that it needs only energy and materials that are abundant on the Moon. Cements and adhesives, which are cheaper on Earth, need materials that are very scarce or absent on the Moon.
Such deposits of rocks with very high content of silicon dioxide, like sands, are formed on Earth by the action of water, which dissolves the more alkaline oxides from the rocks, leaving sand made mostly of quartz. There are no such sands on the Moon.
However, I have not mentioned above that besides sintering, there is an alternative way of making solids from lunar dust and rocks, which is to melt them completely and cast them into solid blocks.
However, this would be more difficult than sintering, because it must be done inside a sealed space, filled with some gas (materials do not melt in vacuum, they sublimate), and it would require a greater energy.
When introducing in the sealed space and extracting from it the raw materials and the end products, there would be some losses of the pressuring gas. Nevertheless, when melting rocks made of oxides, unlike when melting metals, the gas could be oxygen extracted from the lunar rocks, so its losses would not be important.
However, the use of oxygen as the working gas would make difficult to find a material from which to make the walls and the casting die, because such a material would have to resist both oxygen and melted oxides at high temperatures, which few materials are able to do, except some platinum-group metals, but even those do not last forever and need periodic replacements.