But a new study suggests that the materials do not have to come from Earth at all. In research publishing on September 10 in the journal Chem Circularity, a team of scientists has developed a recipe that could one day be used to 3D print houses on Mars. The formula combines one ingredient that Mars has in abundance—Martian rock—with a pair of surprisingly humble Earthly imports: gelatin and yeast. Once the printed material dries and hardens under Martian conditions, it becomes a living building material with a compressive strength comparable to low-grade concrete. And because the material is alive, it can be broken down, recycled, and brewed again for new construction, offering something that no conventional building product on Earth or Mars can match: a genuinely circular building economy on another world.

The inspiration for the project came, perhaps unexpectedly, from the kitchen. My inspiration came from freeze-dried fruits that become harder, says civil engineer and senior author Jishen Qiu of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Mars’s extremely low temperature and pressure create conditions that are strikingly similar to the freeze-drying process used to preserve food, in which moisture is drawn out of a material while it is frozen. So I asked myself if we can take advantage of that and make some materials, Qiu explains. Rather than fighting the planet’s punishing environment, the team decided to exploit it, turning the very conditions that make Mars hostile into a natural manufacturing step that hardens and stabilizes their printed structures.

To conjure the printable material, Qiu and her colleagues needed the right mixture of sand and glue. In this case, the sand is crushed Martian rock, which provides mass and structural bulk, while the glue is a carefully engineered blend of gelatin and a specialized strain of yeast. The team engineered yeast cells coated with highly adhesive proteins, including the same kinds of molecules that mussels use to cling tenaciously to rocks in the surf zone. The gelatin knits the ingredients together into a coherent paste and provides a hospitable scaffold in which the yeast cells can live and grow, while the adhesive proteins bind the mineral particles to one another and to the organic matrix. The result is a slurry that behaves like an ink, thick enough to hold its shape as it emerges from a printing nozzle yet fluid enough to be extruded layer by layer into a designed form.

The critical test came when the researchers exposed their printed material to simulated Martian conditions. Once the mixture pushes through the nozzle, the extreme cold and low pressure of the chamber freeze-dry it almost immediately. Under these conditions, water does not simply melt and evaporate; instead, it freezes and then sublimates, turning directly from ice into vapor without ever passing through a liquid phase. As the ice crystals vanish, they leave behind a network of microscopic pores throughout the material. The final product resembles a foam—light, porous, and rigid—whose internal architecture is sculpted by the sublimation process itself. In effect, the Martian atmosphere performs the final curing step for free, requiring no kilns, no furnaces, and no external energy input beyond the cold and vacuum that the planet already provides.

For now, the printed structures are modest in scale: small domes roughly the size of a wine cork, standing 45 millimeters tall and 30 millimeters wide. But the material itself is far more impressive than its dimensions suggest. The team measured a compressive strength of 10 to 12 megapascals, a figure comparable to low-grade concrete used in everyday construction on Earth. So this is actually strong enough to build a one- or two-story building on Earth whose gravity is three times that of Mars, Qiu says. So, you can probably easily build a multistory building on Mars with the material. Because Martian gravity is only about a third as strong as Earth’s, structures printed from this material would experience far less compressive load than their terrestrial counterparts, meaning the strength demonstrated in the laboratory translates into even greater structural headroom on the Red Planet itself.

The approach stands in sharp contrast to many other proposals for building extraterrestrial cities, most of which involve heating and melting Martian rocks or lunar dust into bricks and beams. Sintering or smelting regolith requires substantial energy, typically delivered by kilns, lasers, or concentrated sunlight, all of which demand heavy equipment and a robust power supply that settlers would need to establish before construction could even begin. The biology-based material takes an entirely different manufacturing approach, saving the enormous energy cost of heating by letting freeze-drying do the hardening instead. Just as importantly, it could support a circular economy on Mars. Settlers could recover the yeast from dismantled or damaged structures and regrow it in bioreactors, turning old buildings into feedstock for new ones. As long as there’s one yeast that’s still alive, you can grow them again, Qiu says—a resilience that ordinary concrete, mortar, and steel can never offer.

Significant challenges remain before anyone could print a habitat on the Martian surface. So far, the living building material has only been tested on Earth, under chambers that simulate Martian temperature and pressure but cannot capture every nuance of the planet’s environment, including its radiation environment and the chemistry of its dust. The team does not yet know whether the engineered yeasts can survive actual Martian conditions over the long term, where cosmic radiation and desiccation would test any living system. The material still relies, albeit to a lesser degree than conventional approaches, on Earthly ingredients: the gelatin, the engineered yeast, and the adhesive proteins would all need to be shipped from home, at least initially. Its ultimate success will therefore depend in part on advances in rocket technology and launch economics. Qiu estimates that meaningful on-site engineering could require hundreds of tons of cargo from Earth, a figure that underscores how much progress is still needed before biology can truly carry the weight of extraterrestrial construction.

Even so, the researchers are optimistic that the fundamental physics and biology are on their side. I always ask myself: Is there any physical law or fundamental mechanism that prevents us from doing this? Qiu says. I can’t see any at this point in time. We are confident in scaling it up. The team’s confidence rests on the fact that every step of the process—mixing, extrusion, freeze-drying, and biological recovery—has already been demonstrated, at least at laboratory scale, under conditions that mimic Mars. What remains is engineering: scaling up the printers, hardening the yeasts against radiation, and closing the loop on ingredient recycling so that each mission carries less and reuses more. It would surprise me if materials for future Martian engineering will not be as diverse as those used in Earth engineering—and biology will certainly contribute, Qiu says. If she is right, the first houses on Mars may not be built at all in the traditional sense. They may be grown, printed, and brewed into existence by an army of microscopic builders, one freeze-dried layer at a time, turning the planet’s own hostile climate into the most reliable construction worker on site.

Subject of Research: Engineered living building material made from Martian rock, gelatin, and yeast for 3D-printed low-energy construction on Mars

Article Title: Scientists want to 3D print houses on Mars with the help of yeast

Article References: Scientists want to 3D print houses on Mars with the help of yeast. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Mars, 3D printing, living building material, engineered yeast, gelatin, freeze-drying, compressive strength, circular economy, space construction, regolith, bioreactors, Cell Press

The material at the heart of this work is lunar regolith, the loose, fragmented layer of rock, mineral grains, and glassy particles that blankets the lunar surface to depths of several meters. Regolith is the product of billions of years of meteorite impacts that pulverized the lunar crust, and its composition varies across the Moon but generally includes silicate minerals, oxides of iron, titanium, calcium, and aluminum, and a significant fraction of agglutinates, which are irregular glassy particles welded together by micrometeorite impacts. Because this material is already sitting on the lunar surface in essentially unlimited quantities, it represents the single most obvious feedstock for any serious attempt at in-situ resource utilization, the strategy of living off the land beyond Earth.

Additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, offers a natural fit for this challenge. Unlike conventional construction, which relies on large machinery, formwork, and a skilled workforce, additive manufacturing builds structures layer by layer from a digital design, using only the material that is actually needed. On the Moon, where every machine must be shipped from Earth and operated in a vacuum, under extreme temperature swings, and amid abrasive dust, the appeal of a compact, automated, digitally controlled fabrication system is hard to overstate. A single printer, paired with a regolith harvesting and processing system, could in principle fabricate walls, foundations, radiation shields, landing pads, and infrastructure components on demand, adapting each design to local terrain and mission requirements without waiting for resupply missions.

What distinguishes the new study is its emphasis on reconfigurability. Most visions of printed lunar habitats assume a one-way process: a structure is designed, printed, and fixed in place forever. But mission planners increasingly recognize that lunar bases, like the missions that precede them, will need to evolve. Equipment will be replaced, modules will be repurposed, and habitats will need to expand or contract as crew rotations and scientific priorities change. Building blocks that can be printed, assembled, disassembled, and reassembled into new configurations would give lunar architects a flexibility that monolithic printed structures cannot provide. Instead of demolishing a wall to build a new room, crews could simply take the wall apart and reprint or reposition its elements elsewhere.

Achieving this vision requires solving a chain of interlocking technical problems, and the researchers address them across the full workflow. The first step is feedstock preparation. Raw lunar regolith, whether actual Apollo-era samples or, more commonly in laboratory research, lunar regolith simulants that replicate the mineralogy and particle size distribution of the real material, must be sieved, sorted, and in some cases processed into a form suitable for printing. The sharp, irregular, and glassy nature of regolith particles makes them abrasive and difficult to flow uniformly, so particle engineering plays a crucial role in producing a feedstock that a printer can handle reliably.

The second step is the printing process itself, and here the study examines how regolith-based materials behave when deposited layer by layer. A central tension in lunar construction chemistry is the binder problem. On Earth, concrete gains its strength from Portland cement, whose production requires water and generates carbon dioxide through the calcination of limestone. Neither the water nor the emissions are acceptable on the Moon, where water is a precious resource and there is no atmosphere to pollute. Alternatives under investigation across the field include geopolymer chemistry, in which alkaline solutions activate the aluminosilicate minerals in regolith to form cement-like binders; sintering, in which concentrated heat from lasers, microwaves, or focused sunlight fuses regolith particles into solid masses without any binder at all; and small quantities of imported bonding agents, such as polymers, used as economically as possible.

Each route involves trade-offs that the researchers weigh in detail. Sintering produces genuinely binder-free structures, a major advantage for long-term self-sufficiency, but the vacuum environment complicates heat transfer and can trap gases released from the regolith, causing porosity and cracking. Thermal expansion mismatches between layers and the extreme thermal cycling between lunar day and night, where surface temperatures can swing by more than two hundred degrees Celsius, add further stresses. Geopolymers and chemical binders can deliver strong, dense components at lower processing temperatures, but they introduce dependence on reactants that must either be sourced locally or transported from Earth. The study’s framework for reconfigurable blocks is designed to accommodate this uncertainty: because the blocks are modular, a printing process can be refined or even replaced over time without abandoning the structures already built from earlier batches.

Mechanical performance is, of course, the bottom line for any structural material, and the reported work includes evaluation of the printed blocks under conditions relevant to lunar service. Compressive strength is the primary metric, since lunar habitats will mostly experience compressive loads from overlying regolith shielding piled on top of habitats to protect crews from galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events. Several meters of regolith cover are typically proposed for radiation protection, which means the underlying structure must bear substantial static loads in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity. The blocks must also tolerate internal pressurization, because habitats will hold breathable atmosphere at pressures that push outward on the walls, creating tensile stresses that brittle, sintered regolith handles poorly. Strategies to address this include placing habitat pressure vessels inside regolith-block shells, reinforcing blocks with fibers or mesh, and designing interlocking geometries that distribute loads across many contact surfaces rather than relying on mortar joints.

The interlocking geometry is where the reconfigurable concept becomes tangible. Rather than printing large monolithic panels, the researchers envision blocks with engineered shapes, analogous to LEGO bricks or precision masonry units, that can be stacked into curved walls, domes, and vaults and later separated without destructive force. Digital design tools allow each block’s geometry to be optimized for its position in a structure, embedding channels for cables and pipes, sockets for mounting hardware, or keying features that align with robotic grippers. This last point matters because much of the assembly on the Moon will likely be performed by robots rather than astronauts. Robotic arms placing regolith blocks in a vacuum environment avoid the hazards of EVA, and modularity suits robotic manipulation far better than amorphous printed masses, since discrete units with well-defined geometry can be grasped, positioned, and verified with existing machine-vision techniques.

Looking toward actual missions, the researchers situate their work within the broader context of NASA’s Artemis program and international plans for a sustained lunar presence, including the proposed Moon Village concept championed by the European Space Agency. The surface of the Moon is expected to host multiple cooperating installations in the coming decades, from the Gateway-linked Artemis Base Camp at the lunar south pole to landing infrastructure, power plants, telescopes, and pilot plants for extracting oxygen and metals from regolith. All of these will need construction materials, radiation shielding, thermal management, and foundations, and all of them will benefit from a standardized, printable, reconfigurable building system. The authors position their building blocks not as a finished habitat but as a scalable construction primitive, a verified unit of lunar architecture around which future designs, standards, and robotic systems can converge.

Significant engineering hurdles remain before regolith blocks are stacked on the lunar surface. Testing with genuine lunar samples is rare and limited by the tiny quantities of Apollo material available, so validation ultimately depends on simulants whose fidelity to the real thing is imperfect and whose behavior under vacuum, radiation, and thermal cycling differs in ways that are still being characterized. Printing at useful scale in vacuum, with lunar gravity and without Earthlike supply chains, has yet to be demonstrated in an operational setting, although parabolic flights and vacuum-chamber experiments continue to close the gap. The new study contributes a coherent pathway through this landscape: a demonstration that regolith can be additively manufactured into discrete, mechanically sound, reconfigurable blocks, and a design philosophy in which habitats grow and change with the missions they serve. If the approach matures as hoped, the first permanent structures on the Moon may not be transported there at all, but printed in place from the ground beneath future astronauts’ boots, one reconfigurable block at a time.

Subject of Research: Additive manufacturing of lunar regolith into reconfigurable building blocks for lunar habitation.

Article Title: Additive manufacturing of lunar regolith for reconfigurable building blocks toward lunar habitation

Article References: McCallum, C., Liang, Y., Tushar, N., Xu, B., Zhao, B., Zeng, H., & Shou, W. (2026). Additive manufacturing of lunar regolith for reconfigurable building blocks toward lunar habitation. npj Advanced Manufacturing. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44334-026-00111-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44334-026-00111-x

Keywords: lunar regolith, additive manufacturing, 3D printing, lunar habitation, in-situ resource utilization, Moon base, space construction, sintering, geopolymer binders, reconfigurable building blocks, Artemis program, radiation shielding