Building on Mars — Rooted In Dreams

One of my favorite games is Surviving Mars, published by Paradox Interactive. In it, you control the first colonists to Mars. As you can imagine there are countless challenges and hardships that you have to overcome. In a moment’s notice all of your hard work can disappear with one dust devil or meteor.

While many of the resources sound impressive and would fit into a ‘space survival’ game (such as water, Oxygen, food), the resource I was most surprised to see was concrete. Concrete? Really? What makes it such an essential resource to have if we are to live on the red planet?

Imagine you were moving across the country. What do you take with you? Certainly everything that couldn’t be replaced (photos, pets, gifts), clothes, maybe some snacks along the way. But you wouldn’t move your entire house, right? Even moving all of the furniture in the house is minimal compared to the cost of transporting an entire building!

Building on Mars is the same problem, just exaggerated. Costs are astronomical to transport anything, so any material we can use there means we have more room in our space shuttle to transport what is impossible or extremely hard to find on Mars (plants, robots, people). Concrete, being essentially just rocks and water, will be easy enough to make now that we have discovered water on Mars.

A design that isn’t in the game, but won a recent award by NASA, is a 3D printed structure…out of ICE!

New York, NY - SEArch (Space Exploration Architecture) and Clouds AO (Clouds Architecture Office), an architecture and space research collective, were awarded the $25,000 top prize Sunday, September 27th in the NASA and America Makes sponsored competition 3D Printed Habitat Challenge for Mars. The competition asked teams to design a habitat for four crew members while highlighting 3D printing techniques and using material indigenous to Mars. Recognizing that water is the building block to life, the team used a ‘follow the water’ approach to conceptualize, site and construct their design. ICE HOUSE was born from the imperative to bring light and a connection to the outdoors into the vocabulary of Martian architecture. The winning proposal stood out as one of the few entries not to bury the habitat beneath regolith, instead mining the anticipated abundance of subsurface ice in the northern regions to create a thin vertical ice shell capable of protecting the interior habitat from radiation while celebrating life above ground. ICE HOUSE was one of 30 designs to advance to the third round finals from an original 162, ultimately taking home first place ahead of entries from the European Space Agency and international firm Fosters and Partners. A 3D printed scaled model of the design was presented to the public at the Maker’s Faire September 26th and 27th. Throughout the challenge, the team also experimented with 3D ice prototyping, redefining traditional methods of 3D printing by instead relying on the physics of phase transition between solid and vapor states. The SEArch / Clouds AO team, with ties to Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Parsons School of Design, is comprised of eight noted designers including: Christina Ciardullo, Kelsey Lents, Jeffrey Montes, Michael Morris (project team leader) and Melodie Yashar of SEArch, and Ostap Rudakevych, Masayuki Sono, and Yuko Sono of Clouds AO. Consulting on the project are fourteen leading space related subject matter experts (SME’s) comprised of scientists, astrophysicists, geologists, structural and 3D printing engineers. http://www.spacexarch.com/mars-ice-house/

While concrete would be great for all areas, there would be appeal to use ice for more ‘livability’ (you can hardly use concrete as a window) in polar regions. The basic idea is that ice is strong enough to provide structure, while also transparent to let light through. It would also block radiation by having a double layer.

While I personally would never want to live in Mars, I’m excited to see how architects play their role in living on the red planet!