From the moment of arrival, life on Mars will be a constant challenge - with harsh conditions and limited familiar materials. A new colony would have to adapt to new ways of life: A mutable city with a structured urban environment for change would be suitable for these potentially nomadic inhabitants.
The project aims to build a colony that is self-growing, safely buildable, self-sufficient and scalable.
On arrival, three robots will be deployed: a mining robot, a builder robot and a printing robot. The mining robot will extract the materials that will be used to build the colony. To reduce dependence on terrestrial materials, the colony will be made of an aggregate of the materials that are present on Mars, primarily tholeiitic basalt for the walls and iron oxide for the structure. These structures will be formed by the printing robot and used by the building robot. The building robots will also be capable of producing further robots.
After the first phase of the colony is completed, a new type of mining robot will be built in order to travel to ice deposit sites and create a Rod well to harvest liquid water from the ice.
The colony will be formed of cells, composed of a small number of living units and a collective unit that will be shared by all inhabitants of that cell.
Initially there will be ten cells, with five living units and one collective unit each. As this phase is finished and all the basic utilities are completed, the central dome will be built. This dome will be made of graphene, due to its strength and transparency, and will contain a collection of vegetation and leisure spaces. The cells will be connected to the central dome by a series of passages made of Mars aggregate. As the colony grows, new specialised units will be built, such as research, education and physical training spaces.
The colony will grow organically in a concentric spiralling pattern of new cells. The existence of these cells will ensure a sense of community as a decreased risk of dependency on other parts of the colony.
In order to provide room for research, the units will be easily transportable to different areas of Mars with the help of the robots. As every aspect of the planet is studied in detail, there would be the possibility of moving the colony to a more suitable area.
Each living unit will contain a bed and a small desk integrated into the floor and wall in order to provide free space inside the unit, a shower and a moveable storage/kitchen facility. To ensure mental well-being, the walls will be painted in an electrochromatic material which will provide an ever-changing environment for the inhabitants. Each living unit will also contain two virtual reality headsets to provide entertainment.
The collective units will contain hydroponic orchards and vegetable gardens lined on the walls, able to provide enough food for the residents of the cell. The unit will further contain a central leisure area, a water tank and storage/kitchen facilities.
All unit types will be constructed from two layers of Mars aggregate walls and by a metallic structure of iron oxide, both 3D printed, in order to maintain the pressure difference.