[SpaceProgram] Challenges of Building A House on Mars

[cole santos]

I think the easiest way to build a large habitat on a rocky planet is
a tunneling device. If its autonomous it could build tunnels for years
before anyone gets there. Then astronauts would simply inflate some
high strength inflatables, like a bouncy castle and wala underground
city (would be even nicer to fuse the walls with a high power CO2
laser). If you drill the hole at an incline and go super deep, the
bottom of the hole would have higher pressure than at the
surface...Tunnelers are already common in mining operations. There is
even a small town that was built in an old mine shaft system. A small
mobile nuclear power plant could provide power for the drill and
fusing laser.

But like I said in the past, why go to mars? What is there that you
need? Real Estate, Dust, Gravity, Iron Oxide?

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Alex Cureton-Griffiths
<alexcg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting article about NASA's quest for a Mars habitat:
> http://www.txchnologist.com/2012/be-it-ever-so-humble-the-challenges-of-building-a-house-on-mars
>
> Interesting points that could be good project fodder:
> * NASA is investigating ways to build an electrostatic radiation
> shield to protect astronauts
> * NASA is also looking at ways to repurpose discarded supplies and
> packaging to build up the habitat wall over time.
> * building a Martian or Lunar habitat involves a lot of thought about
> how to keep bad things out, including dirt
> * standard of living for astronauts.
> * "On a first trip to Mars it would be impossible to build from
> materials found on the planet. Every component of the habitat will
> either have to be preplaced or arrive with the astronauts" - what
> methods could we use to change this? autonomous mining and
> construction robots sent up before humans?
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