Thursday 17 March 2016

Gobsmacked!

Have a look at this design for a 3-D printable house for Mars colonists. It won first prize in a NASA-supported competition among thousands of entrants.

 If you're not impressed by the innovation, there's no hope for you!
Click on the photo to see the webpage

This left me gobsmacked - a British colloquial expression meaning, I suppose, speechless. Very impressed, full of wonder. But instead of silence, this project gave me a lot to think about and talk about. The frozen-beehive look of the thing is utterly different from almost every other concept of how we could live on Mars. 

The winners of this competition are 'SEArch (Space Exploration Architecture) and Clouds AO (Clouds Architecture Office)' based in New York. They sound like intelligent people, with a name like that!

But also it's a clever design because:

- Water - and ice - is available on Mars, so the Marstronauts won't have to carry it with them. That's called In-Situ Resource Utilisation, in the jargon.
- The 3-D printer robot makes its own rail tracks up the walls, so it can keep adding more ice to the top until it finishes.
- 3-D printing ice! I never thought of that. They use an advanced form of the technique for making clear ice cubes - by studying the phase change of water to ice crystals in different conditions. A quote from their site: " ... an understanding of the physics of phase change and the temperature and pressure conditions of the Martian environment, as well as an understanding of the physical deposition techniques required ..."
- Molecules of humble 20 are excellent barricades against the radiation which bombards the surface of Mars. Earth has a strong magnetic field which deflects most of the charged particles of the solar wind, but the magnetic field of Mars is too feeble to have much effect. A thick enough mantle of water can be an effective shield. See this research paper (if you have trouble getting to sleep at night!) Seriously, it's very informative if you can wade through it.

I'm off now to read the rest of it. Maybe the Red Planet Cafe could have an annex made of ice. It would be like a conservatory, but I'm not sure I could grow rubber plants there. I could store the cold drinks in it, at least, and the frozen chicken.

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