Final Project

Travis H.

Legislator:  Terry Keel, Representative

(Click on the image above to enlarge.)

The Martian colony Mars One is a completely self-sufficient colony with the main exports of metals and information. There are three main domes, five attached small domes, four pressurized detached domes and large areas of open Martian soil for scientific research. Further from the living area are the landing pad to the east and the mining fields to the west. There is living and working space for approximately 200 families, or as many as a thousand people. Additional domes can be built and attached without much trouble to the builders, adding living space, working space, a pressurized mining dome, or research space.

The materials for the beginning domes are shipped in from the moon. Steel, mined and refined on the moon, and fiberglass/Plexiglas made from lunar silicon. Microchips and circuit boards made on the moon from lunar silicon could be programmed to control the telepresence robots made from lunar steel. Lunar titanium could be used to build the ships that would land on Mars to deliver the building materials. All of this could be launched from the moon to save the money for the fuel for launch to low and high Earth orbits. It could also shave some time off the transit time. It would also make sense for the lunar base and Mars One to communicate to combine data for further transit and processing on Earth.

In the three main domes, all buildings and vehicles are pressurized, in case of a breach of the outer shell. All of the interconnecting tunnels leading between the large domes and connecting the small domes to the large domes and the small domes together as well, are sealed on each end with sealing airlocks in case of an outer shell breach. It is for the reason of personal security that airlocks are so frequent. The Eastern Dome is focused on feeding the colony. Chickens, cows, pigs, and other livestock are raised on a large grassy fenced in area. Directly across from that is the farmland where the corn, wheat, and other pants are grown, not necessarily in abundance, but in variety. The plants are then stored in the produce storage building; the animals are slaughtered and butchered and stored in the cold food storage. Milk and dairy products are produced and stored in compartments within the cold food storage area. The machinery in the machinery storage is for the farming, for reparations to the domes and reparations of the landing crafts. Since Mars has a lesser gravity field than Earth, it would be cheaper to produce materials for Interplanetary Launch on Mars than Earth. It would also be easier to launch from Mars to the Asteroid Belt to explore it and map it.

The Central Dome is the housing area, where all the houses are located.  Also located in the Central Dome are the government and business offices, the waste-processing unit, the information processing unit, and two large gardens. The buildings are airlocked for the safety of all people within the dome. The houses are made with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living/entertainment area, a kitchen, a dining room and a small home office. The government office building consists of about two hundred offices, most of which are unused, though built so that this will be the capital city of Mars, once other colonies have been constructed, and therefore we must plan ahead. The business office building is where the people who have white-collar jobs work. There are also about two hundred offices here, and all of these are used for civilian corporations. The waste-processing unit processes all wastes for recycled use. The water is especially important, on this planet where water is so scarce. The same processes would be used as are used on the ISS and in the moon base. The human and animal feces would also be reused for fertilizer in the gardens and farmland. The garbage would be sorted into organic, inorganic recyclable, and inorganic unrecyclable by the colonists. The organic would be used as compost, the inorganic recyclable would be recycled, and the inorganic unrecyclable would be compacted and buried in a designated area outside the colony. The information-processing unit is just a large room of computers. These computers are designated for different projects. These projects include processing of scientific data, compilation of all outgoing data, decompilation of all incoming data, Internet access server, Internet server, and television reformator. There is a lot of data on the Internet, but it must be on local servers on Mars. If you think that the thirty seconds it takes for a web page to load up on a 56k modem is frustrating, imagine a wait of well over thirty minutes. The web server would capture the most likely viewed web pages first, the less likely web sites and so on. Once all of the web sites have been downloaded to the local servers, a message is sent to Mars by InterNIC every time a web site is added. The server constantly checks all the web sites for updates, probably checking everything about once a day to two days, more frequently for more frequently visited web sites. This all takes place on the main satellite uplink, while scientists use the secondary. When the Earth and Mars are not facing each other, the signal is bounced off of satellites. The television reformatting takes place because Mars has a longer day than Earth. The down time is used for local advertisements and just empty space. It would get a little frustrating if your favorite television program came on half an hour earlier than the day before, every day. You would have to keep extremely close tabs and an extra clock in order to keep track of time for television.

All communications and entertainment would take place via the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) of computers that is located throughout the colony. At speeds of 100 megabits per second videoconferencing, television and surfing can easily take place at the same time. The houses each have their own LAN and a computer in each bedroom, office and entertainment room. The offices are also hooked into their own LANs. These LANs are all connected into the MAN. This allows extremely efficient web browsing, communications, and entertainment to take place, while protecting the security and privacy of the colonists. CAT V cabling would be used within a LAN and would be hooked into an Ethernet switch and four of these LANs would be connected to each other via a router. From this switch, a Fiber Optic line attaches these LANs to the information-processing unit.

The five connected smaller pressurized domes are the colonial observatory, Comm-Sat uplink, backup Comm-Sat uplink, hazardous experiments dome, and the backup oxygen refinery. The colonial observatory is a set of telescopes to study the phases of the Martian moons and stars from behind the glass in a pressurized environment. The two Comm-Sat uplinks allow communications with Earth via Martian satellites. The delay for communications is approximately forty minutes, but that is better than nothing, and two are necessary, so that if something happens to one there is still another to take up a distress call to Earth. The dome denoted for hazardous science experiments is used for scanning questionable materials found on the surface, and for combining materials, when the reaction is unknown. During a hazardous experiment or screening the dome is airlocked off from the main colony so that if anything happens, the colony is not lost. And, of course, the oxygen refinery refines oxygen for the colony to create fresh air. There is a backup oxygen refinery under each building so that during a lockdown, fresh oxygen is supplied to the people in the buildings. These domes are double-airlock sealed, meaning that there is an airlock at each end of the tunnel to provide maximum security. All vehicles, internal and external are airtight and pressurized in case of an accident/incident. The tunnels leading to the small domes, and the ones linking the large domes, are approximately four car lanes wide, and about half as high. It is structured the same way as the domes, only in a semi-cylindrical shape instead of a semi-spherical one. These tunnels are large enough to allow transport of all necessary items.

The four small pressurized disconnected domes are for extremely hazardous areas that cannot be attached for reasons if security and safety of the colonists and visitors. The four domes are Incoming/Outgoing Persons Inspection, Quarantine Sickbay, and two Fusion/Fission generators. The Incoming/Outgoing Persons Inspection dome is to search all traveling persons for weapons, drugs, contraband, and other illegal materials as well as a place for a check-up to check for illnesses. The Quarantine Sickbay is where people who are extremely sick are taken to prevent the spread of the illness. Sicknesses that would warrant quarantine is any illness that is transmittable by air or physical contact and the effects are bad enough to seriously worry the colonists. The two Fusion/Fission generators supplement the solar power fields for electricity. The recommended nuclear reaction is the cleaner fusion, but if such is not available at the time of construction, then fission will have to be used until a better method is developed. Those are separated to limit radiation entering the colony, and to help prevent a major disastrous meltdown. The power generated by these sources is enough for the colony and science projects going on around the colony.

The main research takes place in the depressurized observatory, the pressurized observatory, the labs in the Western dome, and the fields between the domes where plants are attempted to be grown in the atmosphere of Mars, and not within any man-made pressurized dome. The entire planet could be combed for traces of the existence of life, for any new elements, and for elements rare to Earth. Another use of the colony would be to locate a nearby area for another colony, close enough to trade, but far enough not to interfere with the growth of either. The depressurized and pressurized observatory are used to note anomalies that Earth air creates as opposed to those which Martian air makes, and for a stereoscopic view of the moons, stars, planets, and asteroid belt. Asteroids could prove to be an easily accessible form of raw materials for spacecrafts and colony/Earth needed supplies. Also, with a detailed map of the Asteroid Belt, we could discover any possible danger to the Earth long before it became a danger to the Earth, and give us a fighting chance. The labs in the Western Dome are for data processing, mathematical computations, school teaching, and gravity experiments. The final, and possibly most important, experiment is finding out if plants can survive on the surface of Mars without Earth air or a protective dome. If they can then plants could be sent over en masse and the people could attempt to make the place a little more hospitable. If the plants do grow, then of course they would generate oxygen. Over the course of a couple of centuries, the air on Mars could become breathable, and that would be worth all of the effort put into the project. Then the only things the domes I designed would be good for is a historical monument, and that would be the best thing for mankind. If not, at least we tried, and maybe we can fix the later so that they can.

The metal and products made from the metal would be the main export from Mars. It could be sent off the planet in return for rare materials such as wood and soap. Anything that cannot be found on Mars or built from materials found on Mars could be traded for using objects made from materials that are found on Mars. Mainly iron, steel, and other metals and things made of these would be exported. These would be mined from the Western mines, preferably in a field where the land is rich in metallic elements (just about anywhere on Mars). The more steel and titanium sent back to Earth for construction there the better. It would have to be shipped in huge bulk amounts in order to make it worth the trip, but mainly the colony is for scientific research and building ships for further space exploration and colonization. Some of the later projects may include space refineries which would work in the Asteroid Belt capturing and refining asteroids and loading the resulting metal on ships for transfer to Mars, the Moon, and Earth.

Between Mars and the moon, NASA could supply supplies for two of the largest industries: computers and cars. This could reduce the cost, increase the availability and make colonies visibly profitable, all in one blow. This would increase the interest of the public in working, living, and vacationing in space. It would make them more likely to allow increased funding to the space program, even if it did mean slightly increased taxes.  The people as a whole would support the program and lift it above where it could have reached on its own.

I used the online curriculum, http://aerospacescholars.org, Encarta Online, http://www.encarta.com, and Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.eb.com, for general information and personal experience for ideas of what people would most like to see done with the space program. Out of people surveyed at my high school over 80% would like to visit another planet, and over half of those would like to live on Mars or the Moon. Therefore, a visitor program could be profitable, and using civilians to live and work on another planet could well give the interest and political support necessary for a strong program. The main point of a permanent colony on Mars, though, is the scientific research, mainly with gravity and the Martian atmosphere.

Last Updated: 09/07/01