Astronauts could use their blood and urine to make Martian concrete

By Matthew Sparkes

Constructing Mars bases will be expensive due to the vast cost of transporting heavy materials, but researchers have found one way to cut down the price: mixing native planetary soil with astronaut blood and urine to make building supplies.

Aled Roberts at the University of Manchester, UK, and his colleagues extracted a protein from human blood called serum albumin, which is vital in maintaining the balance of fluids in the body, and used it to bind together simulated Mars soil to produce a concrete-like material …