ISRU Division · Regolith & Silicate Processing

From Dust to Structure — The Regolith Pipeline

Silicate regolith is the single most abundant solid material in the solar system — and the least glamorous. Overby Industries turns it into the structural backbone of every off-world facility: UHPC aggregate, basalt fibre composite, sintered shielding brick, and refined aluminium, all without importing a single kilogram of raw material from Earth.

Core Process · Beneficiation & Sintering

Sharp, Sterile, and Everywhere

Lunar and asteroid regolith has never been exposed to wind or water erosion, so its grains stay glass-sharp and mechanically interlocking at the micron scale — a property that makes it abrasive to machinery, but ideal for sintering into dense, high-strength solids once separated by particle size and mineral content.

Every Overby regolith processor runs a closed dust-handling loop — no fines escape into the surrounding environment, and nothing that enters the hopper leaves as waste.

Regolith Processing Cycle
01 — Collect

Bucket-wheel and scraper-blade excavators strip the top 10–30cm of regolith, the depth band with the most consistent mineral distribution. Sealed hoppers prevent fines from becoming an ambient dust hazard around outpost infrastructure.

02 — Screen

Vibratory sieve stacks separate collected material by grain size. Fine dust (<100 μm) is routed to sintering feedstock; coarser fractions go to aggregate and crushed-rock construction fill.

03 — Beneficiate

Magnetic and electrostatic separators pull ilmenite and free metallic iron from the silicate matrix. What remains is a mineral-sorted feedstock ready for thermal or chemical processing by target output.

04 — Thermal Process

Concentrated solar or induction furnaces sinter fine regolith into dense ceramic brick, or melt basalt-rich fractions for fibre drawing. Ilmenite fractions are reduced to extract titanium and oxygen.

05 — Cast & Extrude

Molten basalt is drawn into continuous fibre for composite reinforcement. UHPC aggregate is mixed with binder and cast into structural panels. Sintered brick is pressed and cured in standard shielding-block dimensions.

06 — Cure & Stockpile

Finished elements cure under controlled thermal conditions and are stockpiled at the outpost for immediate construction use or Starlifter II cargo loading. Zero fines are discarded at any stage.

Output Streams · Structural Materials

Four Products, One Feedstock

A single regolith processor supplies every structural material an outpost needs to expand — construction aggregate, reinforcement fibre, radiation shielding, and refined metal — routing each mineral fraction to the output that suits it best.

UHPC Construction Aggregate

Ultra-High Performance Concrete cast from sintered basalt aggregate and binder, providing the primary compression-strength structural material for outpost expansion modules and mega-factory habitat framing.

Basalt Fibre Composites

Continuous fibre drawn from molten basalt provides tensile reinforcement wherever UHPC alone would fail in tension — floor panels, pressure vessel wrapping, and structural joints throughout the habitat frame.

Sintered Shielding Brick

Dense sintered regolith brick, cast in standardised dimensions, provides passive radiation shielding for habitat walls and serves as backfill material over buried outpost modules.

Aluminium & Titanium Stock

Anorthosite-derived aluminium and ilmenite-derived titanium are extracted from the beneficiated fines, refined into structural stock for framing, fasteners, and precision components.

~40%
Silicon & oxygen by mass in regolith
0
Litres of water required for sintering
100%
Fines captured & routed to output
4
Structural products from one feedstock
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