If all goes as planned, a protective shelter for a permanent Moon-base could be constructed using materials from the Earth’s closest neighbor; robots to mine regolith (a substance that’s capable of being the basis for a shell already on the surface) and operate printers to place said covering over an inflatable structure sent from Earth… this gives new meaning to ‘thinking outside of the box” as this is “thinking outside of the atmosphere!”
(Source) BBC: http://goo.gl/dHSKA