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 thermal 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 vessels, utensils, 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.