Glass

Glass is a transparent, strong, brittle material resistant to most chemicals. Glass could be made from sand, although making glass requires a lot of energy. Glass may be combined with plastics to increase its strength and radiation shielding capabilities. Glass may be used in Greenhouses but it may prove too heavy.

A glass-blower can create a very wide variety of useful instruments and chemical equipment from Martian sand, although these will often have to be designed very differently from the analogous equipment on earth. The glass-blowing craft requires only other small-scale crafts for its equipment (brick-making for the furnace and blacksmithing for its iron tools), thus qualifies as a small-scale craft suitable for a frontier town (small and largely self-sufficient) economy.