NASA in March revealed its four-phase plan to get humans to Mars. And while much work remains before humans land on the Red Planet, urban planners are already drawing up blueprints for future outer world colonies.
One of them is architect Vera Mulyani of Mars City Design, which will use enormous 3D printers to build mock Mars habitats in the Mojave Desert starting next year. They'll serve as as "the blueprint of sustainable cities...for our life on Mars," but before Mars City Design breaks ground, it has called on designers to submit their best ideas for the structures it will build.
PCMag went to meet Mulyani at her Los Angeles office; Here are excerpts from our conversation.
Have you always wanted to go to Mars?
(laughs) Not exactly. I can say I am an explorer, and always have been. But I believe that architecture is, primarily, a philosophy on how humans can coexist with their environment. And sustaining life within cities on Mars will be a huge challenge.
So we set up Mars City Design three years ago and, through our design competition, bring awareness to the challenges of designing for non-Earth environments, surfacing interesting innovations and then, through our real estate collaborations, bringing the prototypes to life to test our hypotheses. Many of the world's older cities cannot adapt to society as it has evolved today—population explosions, resource scarcity, emerging technologies, and so on. We need to think about all these areas before we build future cities on Mars.
Why did you pick the Mojave Desert as a prototyping site?
Our initial idea was just to build out a lab, the Mars City Design Research Center, in the Mojave Desert. It's a similarly inhospitable environment, topologically, and a good place to test our 3D printers in collaboration with civil engineer and robotics technologist Enrico Dini from D-shape, in Italy [and] Brooklyn.
Those are the massive 3D printers, right?
Yes. Sitting within a 6-by-6-meter aluminium casing, we're going to use them to print buildings.
Wow. Back to the Mojave Desert, how far along is the project to build the winning designs from the 2016 competition?
We've taken the winning designs as inspiration but collaborated with the professional architecture firm Series et Series—co-located in France and Venice, California—to draw up blueprints and flesh out the practicalities of the designs.
Did you buy land in the Mojave Desert?
We've partnered with solar energy providers and a developer who owns 700 acres out there. We'll be using the land to build out smart, Martian-style infrastructure test projects, inspired by the winning designs, including an Aerospace kindergarten, science retreats, and a 3D-printed, self-sustaining park which filters and reuses water abundantly. To attract back local rare birds and encourage medicinal desert floral growth, we'll also be creating beehives made of local materials such as regolith.
Not many people know that the Mojave Desert is already something of an aerospace enclave.
Yes. These projects will primarily support the aerospace workers at both Mojave Air & Space Port, a civilian testing site, and the military personnel at Edwards Air Force Base. There's so little infrastructure out there, and it's a grueling commute for many, so our work will improve their day-to-day lives in that area itself.
Your approach seems to be about working through sustainable—and aesthetically pleasing—designs from the ground up, as opposed to dumping some biospheres on Mars, kicking off space-science exploration, and hope the architects will follow on later missions to make it livable?
Yes, we want to awaken beautiful treasures inside the natural ecosystem, working within the restraints of the environment.
Can you talk about your close ties with NASA?
NASA have been very good allies to us at Mars City Design. They collaborate with us by providing mentors, including Jim K. Erickson (pictured above, right) and Rob Manning, Chief Engineer for US Mars Missions, to ensure accuracy of Mars' environmental conditions, so we can adapt our designs to reality as opposed to sci-fi dreams.
Related
- Drinking Beer on Mars Faces 8 ChallengesDrinking Beer on Mars Faces 8 Challenges
Other space companies and organizations who support us to grow include: Aerospace Corporation—Dave Bearden, General Manager of NASA & Civil Space Programs at The Aerospace Corporation, will be among our jury team next year; Dr. Pierre-Philippe Mathieu, an Earth Observation Data Scientist [at the European Space Agency] is one of our 2017 judges; Lockheed Martin; NASA JPL; Aerojet Rocketdyne; Virgin Galactic; and the Buzz Aldrin Institute. In fact, Col. Buzz Aldrin gave the keynote at our 2016 competition event and is one of our allies.
What's next for Mars City Design?
Our judges recently selected 15 semifinalists for the 2017 competition. The three finalists will be announced in October and will win $1,000 cash each, with $20,000 in total value from our sponsor Dassault Systemes (3DS), the software/virtual universes company. We'll also be having our first fundraising gala on May 25, here in LA and, in the meantime, continuing to work on the projects in the Mojave Desert.
We shall come and visit you there later this year then, to get a preview of Mars.
You'd be most welcome! Bring your Mars Passport!