We are many decades away from sintering a lunar civilisation, in part because sintering tends to produce heterogenous solids with distinctly un-concretey properties. "They were failures," says Dr Milad Hamidi, an additive manufacturing scientist at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, of these approaches. "It's not so promising because first we are processing a material that has oxygen. Oxygen you can use, but as soon as you lose this oxygen, you lose a large part of [the regolith] and oxides are very hard, very brittle. And, during oxygen removal, a large part of the oxygen tries to [remove itself] from the molten material and during the solidification you get a lot of porosity. Usually, these are origin points for failures."
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