Construction on Mars: NASA Suggests a Synthetic Lichen to Autonomously Convert Regolith into Building Material

During crewed Mars missions in the coming years, finding ways to reduce supply loads and utilize local materials will be a crucial element to ensuring the success of our explorations of the Red Planet.

To address this, a Texas A&M University engineering professor collaborating with University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers is working to help achieve this with a new bio-engineered synthetic lichen, allowing Mars explorers to grow their own building materials directly on the Red Planet.

Dr. Congrui Grace Jin is the Texas A&M professor behind the new project, with support from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts, the US space agency’s funding arm for radical, long-term concepts related to aerospace. The team spent years developing living substances that can form construction materials on their own, and they have now applied their work to autonomous construction on Mars, utilizing the local regolith.

Early Attempts to Generate Construction Material on Mars

Jin’s work may be the answer to bringing construction materials across vast distances and into challenging environments that are normally lacking in resources. Other attempts to forge construction materials from the Martian regolith have focused on addressing the material shortage, but remain impractical as they have overlooked the likely labor shortage that any early Mars missions will encounter.

Creating solutions for these conditions called for bonding regolith particles with various compounds composed of magnesium or sulfur, as well as a geopolymer concept. Still, all of these required more intensive hands-on work than those early explorers would be able to dedicate to the project.

There have been approaches attempting to minimize the required labor by relying on microbes to help power a self-growing technology. While bacteria and fungi can bind particles into more useful construction materials, such as bricks, the microbes involved often suffer from survivability issues. Previous attempts relied on a single species, requiring a great deal of care and nutrient feeding to remain viable, replacing the regolith bonding focus with an all new task: caring for the microbes.

An Autonomous System for Mars

Minimizing astronauts’ commitments to construction-related labor was a major focus for Jin’s team. To that end, they produced a resilient multi-species synthetic community, resulting in a fully autonomous self-growing process that requires no external nutrients. 

The heterotrophic filamentous fungi that the team utilized have significantly greater survivability than heterotrophic bacteria, while promoting the formation of biominerals to serve as a bonding agent for regolith particles. Photoautotrophic diazotrophic cyanobacteria complete the synthetic lichen by converting atmospheric carbon dioxide and dinitrogen into oxygen and organic nutrients to feed the fungi and increase the carbonate ion concentration, which the fungi bind to their cell walls.

The filamentous fungi complete the cycle by providing water, minerals, and carbon dioxide to the cyanobacteria. Both the fungi and cyanobacteria release biopolymers that adhere the regolith particles together.

Growing Extraterrestrial Building Materials

“We can build a synthetic community by mimicking natural lichens,” explains Jin. “We’ve developed a way to build synthetic lichens to create biomaterials that glue Martian regolith particles into structures. Then, through 3D printing, a wide range of structures can be fabricated, such as buildings, houses, and furniture.”

In testing, the process was successful and fully autonomous, growing in a mixture of simulated regolith, inorganic liquid, light, and air. With the material creation process demonstrated, the team is moving on to testing their regolith material with 3D printing technology.

“The potential of this self-growing technology in enabling long-term extraterrestrial exploration and colonization is significant,” Jin concludes.

The paper “Bio-Manufacturing of Engineered Living Materials for Martian Construction: Design of the Synthetic Community” appeared on June 23, 2025, in the Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.