LSU Research Team Exploring the Future of the Construction

BATON ROUGE, La., Oct. 26, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — As NASA prepares for a late-November launch for the Artemis I Moon Mission, LSU faculty are making preparations of their own to properly train a future-ready construction workforce in extraterrestrial construction.

Led by LSU Construction Management Assistant Professor Amir Jafari, the research group will work over the next year to determine how construction skills on Earth could and would translate to working on a planetary body other than our own. The work is funded by a nearly $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing, [NASA], together with the European Space Agency, revealed plans to…establish permanent human habitats on the Moon and Mars by 2040,” Jafari said. “The vision of becoming an interplanetary species requires the construction industry to face an unprecedented challenge, extraterrestrial construction. In order to promote feasible and sustainable space exploration, these habitats and other infrastructures are envisioned to be built in-situ, which would shape a generation of the extraterrestrial construction industry. Accordingly, the role of construction workers in future extraterrestrial projects will be significantly different from the current practice on Earth.”

The LSU research team will first work—with the help of its collaborators at NASA—to gain a better understanding of what transferable skills are needed for a future extraterrestrial workforce.

“[We] have planned a two-day, interdisciplinary meeting that will bring together the expertise and representatives of the different disciplines that will be involved in the envisioned extraterrestrial construction workforce development, including, but not limited to, engineering, construction science, architecture, computer science, robotics, human-computer interaction, planetary geoscience, workforce development, learning sciences,…