Moonfiber: Design of a Lunar Lavatube Outpost Using Regolith-Composite Fibers

The recent efforts to return to the lunar surface embodied by the development of the Artemis program include the concept of achieving a permanent stay, enabled by ISRU technologies that did not exist at the time of the Apollo Program. This paper presents MoonFiber, a project derived from a competition designed by Young Architects Competition (YAC) for the construction of a settlement located in a lunar lava tube. This choice is determined by the need to exploit a place with characteristics suitable for human permanence in the long term, achieving a balance between safety and construction complexity. The Moon is a hostile environment, seemingly devoid of blatant resources, subject to the most destructive events in the solar system, such as the constant bombardment of both micrometeorites and radiation, as well as occasional solar storms. The project finds full realization, in its working and living functional divisions, below the lunar surface, while the areas used for ISRU, 3D printing, payload unloading, and energy production operations are located near the entrance of the lava tube, to which they connect via a main logistic axis. The main structure, built in the lava tube, is made up of a series of inflatable modules held suspended in the center of the gallery by a mesh of composite material fibers obtained through extrusion and winding of regolith fiber. The weaving technique of the supporting structure becomes the turning point regarding the architectural composition of the settlement because it makes everything light and parameterized based on the morphology of the place, which is subject to an automated preliminary scan by robots performing as an avant-garde fleet, extrapolating the optimized topology underlying the definition of the framework of the system. This structure is initially defined by its anchorages to the lava tube walls, to which the upper and lower load-bearing fibers are connected, on which rests a mesh, also in fiber, which performs the function of a suspended base for the inflatable modules. The construction technique is based on the processing of the fiber filament. The goal is to obtain the filament from the lunar regolith, adaptable in composition with different quantities and types of yarn, from glass to carbon fiber; the production process of such coils of fiber is described in detail in this paper, along with its installation in a notional lava tube.