At the same time, there is the necessity to protect potential lunar base habitats from radiation, meteoroids and thermal extremes. Regolith and especially the fine top layers would be an ideal candidate for this application. One popular idea is to put the regolith in bags and pile it on top of the habitat structure. But as to how to fill the bags efficiently and without generating dust no solutions have so far been presented. Naturally, dust issues directly depend on the bag filling technology.

Honeybee Robotics developed a pneumatic excavator (see figure) for lunar regolith excavation and mining. With this technology, using only 1kg of gas about 6000-9000 kg of regolith can be mined at lunar conditions.