Ceramics – the Forgotten but Essential Ingredients for a Circular Economy on the Moon

Settlement of the Moon will require full exploitation of its resources if such settlements are to be permanent. Such in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) has primarily been focused on accessing water ice at the lunar poles and the use of raw lunar regolith as a compressive building material. Some work has also been examining the extraction of metals but there has been little consideration of the many useful ceramics that can be extracted from the Moon and how they may be fabricated. We introduce a strategy for full lunar industrialisation based on a circular lunar industrial ecology and examine the contribution of ceramics. We review ceramic fabrication methods but focus primarily on 3D printing approaches. The popular direct ink writing method is less suitable for the Moon and other methods require polymers which are scarce on the Moon. This turns out to be crucial, suggesting that full industrialisation of the Moon cannot be completed until the problem of ceramic fabrication is resolved, most likely in conjunction with polymer synthesis from potential carbon sources.