Mars Plan Envisions Comfy Colony
Wired.Com
By Mark Baard | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jul. 27, 2005 PT
A group of aspiring Martians has drawn up detailed plans for
settling the Red Planet, and is working on a cookbook that will use
ingredients grown on Mars.
The Mars Foundation is proposing a settlement in the next 20 years
that would start with a dozen initial inhabitants and eventually
expand to several hundred.
The settlement, about the size of Boston's North End neighborhood,
will use local materials for construction and provide the comforts
of home to terran migrants, including cars (rovers, actually),
garages and living areas with skylights.
"Private living spaces look out across the Martian plain," said
Mars Foundation co-founder Joseph E. Palaia IV, a graduate student
in nuclear engineering at MIT.
The foundation has even scoped out a potential building site for
the settlement, along a hillside 80 yards above the valley floor in
an area called Candor Chasma.
Many in the Mars colonization movement believe humans have a deep
spiritual and psychological need to seek out and explore new
frontiers.
The aim of the foundation's Mars Homestead Project, which started
at MIT, is to give humanity a fresh start on a new planet.
People have been captivated by the latest plans (.pdf) for the Mars
Homestead Settlement, said Georgi Petrov, an architect working on
the project.
Petrov this month presented the foundation's findings at the
International Conference on Environmental Systems in Rome.
"The coolest thing," Petrov wrote in an e-mail to his co-authors,
"was that afterwards, the European astronaut Claude Nicollier came
up to me and he said that he liked it very much and was daydreaming
about going to our settlement."
The foundation believes the first interplanetary settlers could be
sharing meals under a Martian sky in as little as 20 years.
"We believe it's possible for completion of a 12-person settlement
in 2025," said Palaia, "assuming that launch technology and
settlement technology development proceeds as planned."
The Mars Homestead plan goes beyond temporary, "tuna-can" habitats
for explorers proposed by the Mars Society (a separate group) and
NASA.
"Everything NASA and other independent researchers have envisioned
has been in the mode of 'visit, explore and come home,'" said Bruce
Mackenzie, a Mars Foundation co-founder.
The Mars settlement will in fact start with cylindrical tuna-can
habitats, which settlers will live in while they and robots build
permanent structures.
The settlers and robots will work inside pressurized shell areas,
and use steel, aluminum, glass and bricks manufactured on Mars, the
Mars Foundation believes.
The Mars settlement will also have large living quarters, dining
areas and greenhouses with jogging paths, as well as a nearby
nuclear power plant and manufacturing facilities.
Interior public spaces will include two-story bamboo forests,
"providing psychological benefits as well as building material" to
the settlers, said Palaia.
Engineers and scientists from the foundation have spent the past
year studying the feasibility of building a settlement with
technologies likely to become available soon, and by drawing on
Mars' raw materials. The foundation is even calling for
quick-and-easy recipe ideas that will be compiled into the Mars
Cookbook.
Life on the Mars settlement may be difficult at first. Atmospheric
pressure inside the settlement's structures will be similar to that
at 14,000 to 15,000 feet on Earth. (Regolith packed against the
living quarters will help maintain internal pressure.)
But the settlement's oxygen-enriched atmosphere will make breathing
easier.
The Mars Foundation said it is preparing to build a prototype of
the settlement on Earth. The foundation would not say where it will
be built, citing ongoing negotiations with businesses and
politicians.
However, Mars Foundation co-founder Mark Homnick said the model
settlement will likely be near a major city, because the foundation
wants to get the public excited about exploring new
frontiers.
According to Homnick, young people are especially eager to learn
more about becoming Martian settlers.
"When I mention it to children," said Homnick, "they just go
nuts."