Mars is in fashion. Ever since the US space agency, NASA, successfully landed its Perseverance rover on the red planet, the whole world has been waiting to see if life could be sustainable in our arid neighboring world. This is quite a challenge that forward-thinking earthbound designers have been working with for quite some time. What kind of structure could support human life on Mars? What would the houses be like? A city?
With this goal in mind, the international architecture, urban planning and design firm Abiboo Studio (based in Spain, the United States and India) has just revealed its plans for what could be the first large-scale human community on Mars.
Under the name of Nüwa, the Martian city would host 250,000 people and would be built directly on the walls of a huge Martian cliff as a vertical settlement, made with materials available on the planet; specifically, on a cliff about 1 kilometer high on Tempe Mensa Mountain, a rugged area in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The intention of this city embedded in the side of a cliff would be to take advantage of the heat of absorbed sunlight as well as use it as a refuge from dangerous cosmic radiation. The rest of the flat territories would be used for agriculture, energy production and other needs for the future Martian population.
A system of interconnected tunnels would also be drilled into the Martian rock, allowing light to enter from the ends of the cliff tunnel and creating residential and work environments connected to each other through three-dimensional networks of connecting corridors. The modules would have a tubular shape of 10 meters in diameter by 60 meters long, which includes green areas and urban gardens, snow domes to dissipate heat and clean the air, etc …
The first permanent settlement on Mars
The Abiboo study designed this first city on the red planet for the non-profit organization The Mars Society , and fully developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics led by astrophysicist Guillem Anglada , who oversaw the discovery of the exoplanet. Proxima-b , focusing at all times on the self-sufficiency of the capital.
Using modular and scalable cliffside housing systems to form a vertical city would be a daunting task, but architects and engineers are confident that it can be accomplished. The ultimate goal is to operate without a constant supply of shipments from Earth.
Building the city vertically makes a lot of sense : building as we do on Earth would put incredible pressure on the buildings, which would tend to explode under the pressure. In this way, homes and spaces, in general, would not be directly exposed to the sky.
According to its founder, Alfredo Muñoz , the construction of a permanent habitat on a large scale on Mars is feasible this century and, probably, may have more potential to forge a settlement than the Moon. Creating a permanent, self-sustaining habitat on the Moon would be a bigger challenge than on Mars, according to Muñoz.
When would construction begin?
Abiboo’s architects estimate that the colony could begin to rise in 2054 and end in 2100, with the intention that Nüwa be the capital of five Martian cities. What is the reason for the choice of the name of the city? The name comes from Chinese mythology ; she is the goddess “protector of humans, who cast five stones to give sturdy social pillars.”
The biggest challenge?
Manufacturing breathable air is probably the biggest technical hurdle to making this pioneering city viable.
