October 19th 2025
Engineers built a new kind of concrete 2x stronger than the real thing.
The secret ingredient? Potato starch.
Engineers from the University of Manchester say their concrete is twice as strong as conventional concrete. The engineers believe future space construction will need this solution.
Potato starch replaces human blood as a key ingredient in the new recipe.
The University of Manchester’s “StarCrete” is twice as strong as traditional concrete, making it a potential solution as a building material for Mars. Add in some extraterrestrial dust and potato starch, and you have a potentially revolutionary new material.
In an article published in the journal Open Engineering, the research team showed that potato starch can act as a binder when mixed with simulated Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material reaching a compressive strength of 72 megapascals (MPa), over twice as strong as the 32 MPa seen in ordinary concrete. Of course, mix in moon dust instead and you can get StarCrete to 91 MPa.
This strength makes it a possible solution, according to the researchers, for a building solution on Mars as astronauts mix Martian soil with potato starch—and a pinch of salt, no joke—to give extra-terrestrial-suited concrete.
Earlier recipes from the team didn’t use potato starch, instead offering blood and urine as a binding agent to reach 40 MPa. Not every astronaut would be excited about continually draining their blood to build in space, though.
“Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood,” Aled Roberts, research fellow at the Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub and lead researcher on the project, says in a news release. “And anyway, astronauts probably don’t want to be living in houses made from scabs and urine”
Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a69031878/new-concrete-is-twice-as-strong/ and https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/eng-2022-0390/html