It's, ah, much more informal than last year's paper. I did a similar amount of work in modeling and spreadsheet-engineering to form the bones of the thing but ultimately I felt a more informal or conversational style might be better received. Some detail was left out in the interests of readability.
I am in the market for an illustrator who can draw or render a scene or three. My descriptions of the habitat design were not satisfactory; I think only an image can properly convey what was intended. If you are interested or know someone that might be, please reach out. I'll consider direct payment, a portion of any winnings or both depending on the details. Written credit is a given as well.
In the interests of saving you a few clicks I am posting the entire text after the break. This is exactly as submitted. If the competition works the same way as it did last year I'll have a final opportunity to correct any typos and refine formatting before it goes to the printers. Assuming I make the cut, of course, which is far from a given. Feedback is welcome, especially if you disagree with something.
Cheers.
(edited to fix formatting because Blogger doesn't wrap text. Thanks Blogger.)
One Million Martians
Let me tell you a story of how we might settle Mars. We will hear from a handful of people in the 2050s, the decade when our permanent population passes one million. Up first is a young engineer, recently immigrated, who will introduce us to the main settlement and describe living conditions from a hardware-centric perspective. Next is an artist and hydroponics specialist who will talk about culture and food. Last is a shipyard manager, one of the first settlers, to talk a bit more history, economics and solar system access. This is not a blueprint or a business plan, but I hope it serves as inspiration for what could be.
The Engineer
By the end of the 2020’s, SpaceX established a permanent base called Alpha to the northwest of Olympus Mons. With glacial ice close at hand and absurdly cheap ticket prices, demand from space agencies across Earth was huge. Cash poured in by the tens of billions. Astronauts came and explored, a communications network was established and a new frontier was opened for innovation. A new gold rush ensued, with hundreds of companies vying to be the new leader in some tech or another. Fortunes were risked, won and lost. Mistakes were made and people died. We’re human though, and we don’t give up.
Alpha was never going to be the center of civilization on Mars. Too far north for easy power and too far away from anything interesting. Seriously, Arcadia Planitia is a wasteland; Alpha is next to the only hill for almost a thousand kilometers. I’ve been out there on the suborbital shuttle for my propulsion engineering internship and the only things they have going for them are incredible coffee and the best engine team in the solar system.
Home sweet home is Landing, our little slice of dust over in Isidis Planitia. There was never an actual ‘colony ship’ so the name is sort of a reference to old science fiction settlements. We’re at N18 E80 more or less, so the winters aren’t nearly as brutal as Alpha. Air’s nice and thick for landings but we’re a short drive from some pretty rough highland terrain and a lot of weird chemistry. Weird like carbonates and methane seeps which you wouldn’t normally expect on a dead rock; the space agencies on Earth can’t get enough of it even after all this time. The founders thought water would be easy but we have to truck it almost 500 km from glaciers in Nilosyrtis Mensae; it’s a good thing we have self-driving cargo rovers.
Landing is huge. There’s about 42 square kilometers of solar panels, but the loose packing means we’re spread across a bit under 90 km² on the surface. They get 20% efficiency mostly; they could be better but these thin films are easy to make and there’s plenty of real estate up there.
We could have built a giant city dome and lived in futuristic splendor but then one accident could have ended the whole project. Instead we went wide; there are about three hundred ‘avenues’, self-contained underground neighborhoods of around four thousand people connected by transit tunnels. If you can make it two kilometers on foot you can get anywhere in the city and then some. Along with the neighborhood habs, there are industrial avenues built the same way. Dangerous things like the steel mills and the hydrocarbon factories are kept isolated and redundant.
The neighborhoods themselves are hacked out of the flood basalt. First a dragline takes out any loose material, then a roadheader cuts down to good solid rock. After that the rock saws go to work cutting out clean structural blocks. The whole process is mostly automated; humans handle goal-setting, maintenance and occasional patches that don’t scan well. We’ve tried blasting with oxyliquit and nitrogen-based explosives and still use them sometimes, but it’s dangerous and tends to fracture the stone we want. Excavation goes to about 40 meters depth with some foundation work, soundings and the like. After that they move in a big steel frame with rollers to hold blocks in place while the vault is built up with cranes; it gets winched forwards after each course is finished. An inventory management system keeps track of the blocks from quarrying to testing and placement; it’s fully autonomous until something breaks.
The vault is a parabolic arch about 33 meters wide (inside), 18 meters tall and 1.8 kilometers long. Each avenue is two vaults side by side with passages between them; if there’s a problem in one vault everyone can be evacuated to the other one. Each end of the avenue has a transit terminal connected to the rest of the network. Once the transit tunnels are in place the whole thing is sprayed inside and out with a fiber-reinforced polymer sealant to make it airtight, leak tested, then it’s buried under 20 meters of gravel and pressure tested. The vaults are built so they are under compressive load even with a full bar of air pressure inside; with no freeze-thaw cycle and no active tectonics they will last for centuries at least.
Inside those giant vaults is a lot of empty space. 33 meters is huge; that’s about a hundred feet wide. We can build anything in there which is great for the industrial stuff, but most of the space is for people. We’ve got a pretty big steel industry so that is the major structural material: steel beams for load with steel-faced structural insulated panels (SIPs) for surfaces. SIPs have a foam core that cuts down on noise. They’re also really easy to build with; a two-person crew can frame and rough an apartment in half an hour or so. Now inside this vault we build two rows of apartments three floors high, which is nine meters tall and nine meters deep. There’s a nine meter space left open between the two and a pair of three meter spaces in a weird wedge shape at the outside edges of the arch. The wedge shape gets used for utilities and access. That central open space is part plaza, part park, part orchard; we just call it the parkway even though that means something else on Earth. Most parkways have a viewing stand at either end so you can see almost two kilometers away; that and the super tall ceilings seem to help with feelings of confinement underground. The trees help too. In the apartment blocks, about half of the first-floor space is for businesses or services and the rest is housing. Every unit has a view of the parkway. Some of the space above the third floor is used for hydroponics with LED lights, mainly the stuff that’s hard to automate or has continuous harvests. The peak of the arch itself sometimes has murals painted or projected on; my zone has movie nights once a week where we can lay on the grass patch and watch on the ceiling.
Hab avenues have big surface greenhouses for grains and other ‘predictable’ crops. Access is through airlocked elevators at the transit stations; these go up to a service tunnel at the surface that runs the whole length of the avenue. Surface service tunnels are usually fabric pressure vessels buried under a few meters of dirt for radiation shielding. The greenhouses themselves are plastic and kept at low pressures; all the crops are in plastic trays on a cable system so people don’t have to take a dose just to go make repairs. Planting, tending and harvest is almost completely automated. Surface stuff, especially the plastic sheeting, takes a beating and has to be replaced every few years thanks to UV damage and dust abrasion. It’s thermoplastic so recycling is pretty easy, but every bit of maintenance adds up and detoxing all the dust is annoying.
Past the greenhouses on both sides are the PV tents. These are thin film PV blankets draped over a tension cable; the tent shape gets us better power production over the course of the day than a flat panel, keeps the cells cooler and cuts down on dust accumulation. All good things for efficiency, although the tension lines take steel and labor to set up. One reason for building avenues is the DC wiring from the arrays is a lot shorter than it would be for a central plant, so our transmission losses are less. Almost everything runs on DC power within an avenue, but Landing’s main grid is high voltage AC wired through the transit tunnels. There’s a substation at each transit terminal so power can be distributed anywhere. Power storage is mostly handled by block cranes; moving large basalt blocks up or down can store and recover electricity efficiently enough for our needs and with no rare materials like lithium required. These are built along the transit lines for connectivity and stocked with excess blocks from excavation projects. Each avenue needs about 2.7 square kilometers of panels, but the loose packing means we need about 3.8 km² of real estate. We could put avenues about three kilometers apart but that leaves no room for future expansion; instead they are spaced by about 5km.
Industry runs on a seasonal cycle. Spring and summer have excellent weather and sunlight so that’s when we do the power-hungry work like making steel and spinning basalt fiber. Fall is dust season and winter sun is dim so we focus on things that need more time or labor than power. The Martian year is about 1.88 times Earth’s year so those seasons are almost six months long. The residential grid is sized for winter so spring and summer average about 430 GWh of excess power per day. That sounds like a lot but the dim seasons generate about 2 kilowatt-hours per day per square meter of panels vs. 3.5 kWh/m² for the bright. Each person needs about 520 kWh per day to cover food, life support and environmental control which works out to 1,764 m² each at a target productivity of 2 kWh/m². (If ~45 kW for twelve hours per person sounds like a lot of power, remember that our life support is a closed system outside of leaks; that’s a very challenging set of problems and some of the solutions require a lot of juice.) Multiply that area by a million people and 1.5 kWh/m² of surplus, subtract a safety factor and storage loss and you end up with a lot of power left over for industrial applications.
Let’s quickly run down the major industrial systems:
- Easily the biggest consumers of power are the propellant factories. The current demand is about 50 GWh per day to produce methane and oxygen for Earth-bound Starships, Deimos taxi flights and suborbital flights. Production is sun-season only; propellant gets stored in huge insulated tanks underground where it doesn’t take much power to maintain.
- Next largest is the power storage cranes. They stack blocks during the day and lower them to the ground at night, taking advantage of gravity to run the lift motors as generators. It’s less efficient than a similar system on Earth would be, but it requires the least mass from Earth which makes it the cheapest option for us.
- We make about 250 tonnes of steel a day for another GWh or so. It starts as iron-rich surface dust that gets hydrogen reduced and purified by the Mond process. The dust is super-fine so we don’t have to do any grinding, just a sift and a preheat pass to bake out any volatiles and sulfur. Melting and alloying is done in an electric arc furnace. On good sun days we might use surface solar furnaces for part of the process heat. We mill bar, plate and sheet stock for the most part but we also make finely divided iron and iron pentacarbonyl for 3d printing.
- Plastics output is another 250 tonnes daily; this is actually part of a larger hydrocarbon production process based on gas-to-liquids tech that also makes lubricants, soap base (dodecanol) and pharmaceutical feedstocks. Most of our textiles are synthetic and that’s one output of this section. We try to stick to aliphatic polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene but there are some use cases that need aromatic rings; Nomex is a good example, which is used in some habitat systems for heat, chemical and abrasion resistance. We don’t use chlorinated polymers like PVC and we restrict anything that makes toxic fumes to the bare minimum.
- Similar hydrogen-based chemical systems handle nitrogen (Fischer-Tropsch for ammonia) and silicon (silane for polysilicone and semiconductors) in bulk. There’s a wide variety of smaller thermal and electrochemical processes running too including chloralkali for lye plus hydrogen chloride, and Hall-Héroult for aluminum and a few other metals. At the smallest end are a team of bench chemists and chemical engineers that can batch-produce almost anything given enough time; these experts are split among resource production, reclamation and pharmaceutical lines.
- We have dedicated PV cell plants making thin-films for deployment on the surface. Most are some variation of plasma deposition or CVD but we experiment constantly. The easiest backing material is iron with an aluminum film, although we also use glass and polymers as supports with various conductors. We use both indium-tin-oxide and diamond-like-carbon as front contacts depending on availability of indium. Much of our production is tandem cells with amorphous silicon PIN for infrared and titanium perovskite for visible wavelengths since the materials are readily available.
- There is a small silicon foundry for power electronics, phased array elements, monocrystalline silicon PV and MEMS. We’re working on modernizing process nodes down to full microprocessors right now but some of the manufacturing steps are hard to redesign with fully recyclable reagents. Invaluable support towards that effort has come from Earth-based foundries who want to reduce hazardous wastes and consumable reagents for cost and environmental reasons. We’re also prototyping multijunction designs for high-efficiency cells as an export product and for use at surface outposts. The zone refining equipment here is also used to make very high purity samples and to separate things like PGM alloys into their component elements for making catalysts.
- One of the more spectacular jobs is melting basalt in the big solar furnaces; that gets turned into pipes, tiles, reinforcing fibers and rockwool. The pipes are great for slurry or glacial melt thanks to the crazy abrasion resistance. Fibers form the reinforcement in our hab liner. Rockwool can be used for insulation, but we mostly use it as a hydroponic growth medium. That same equipment is used to make glass too, which is mostly decorative plate with some used in appliances, dishes and utensils. Iron dust is a problem; a lot of our glass is a bit green.
- There’s also resource reclamation, which extracts everything useful out of sewage sludge and spent ores alike. It may sound like an unpleasant job but you get to do a lot of cool chemistry and there are running competitions to develop new extraction processes. My bunkmate on the flight out works there and she’s already published a paper on phosphorus extraction from spent iron ores. Mines back on Earth sometimes use techniques we’ve developed to squeeze some extra value out of their tailings or slag.
Residential services are modern. We have a pressurized water system, vacuum toilets and vacuum grey water. Each avenue recycles and UV-sterilizes its own greywater, but sludge gets shipped out to Reclamation to extract nutrients. Apartments have power and optical data lines, a heat pump for temperature and humidity control and an emergency CO2 sorbent bed. Dishwashers and clothes washers save time. Showers have heat recovery so you can use quite a bit of hot water. Hot plates are made locally if you want to cook for yourself but most people eat at a self-serve cafeteria for hot meals or use a public kitchen with all the cool tools. Snacking on vegetables is encouraged; menus are plant-heavy but we do raise fish and chickens. Mail and deliveries are by cargo bot most of the time and all packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable. My apartment is much nicer than my dorm was, and there’s way more to do here than any other place I’ve been.
The Artist
What is culture? The things you do every day or at specific times, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the way you talk, the way things are built. When you share these things with a community you are part of a cultural experience. I believe that food is the foundation of culture. The ingredients available, the ancient recipes, the modern twists: these things are even better than language at identifying cultural ties. At the core of food is of course plants, but they go far beyond this. Traditional textiles and dyes were plant-based. Festivals and schedules revolved around growth cycles, as do many religions. People describe my creative works as sculpture or murals, but I think of myself more as a farmer or gardener than a painter or sculptor. My pieces explore cultural roots and their expressions in new environments; Mars was a natural progression for me. I have murals in several avenues and I’ve exported both ceramic and glass pieces back to Earth.
What is the culture of Mars? There is no one answer to that question, but I can tell you what I see. Outside my window is a Prunus orchard: ornamental Sakura cherry trees are in full bloom, overshadowing the small but still beautiful flowers of fruit cherry trees in their training frames with attendant honeybees. They are raised together to improve pollination and yields, but they also bring a small piece of Japan to Landing. Just like on Earth a whole festival season is organized around the blooms; restaurants offer Japanese-inspired meals, tourists travel to see the sights, children hear stories and learn traditional crafts. The difference here is, this is just one of a dozen avenues with cherries and for various reasons none of them bloom at the same time. Things blend. Time and season are under our direct control. We make the things we enjoy become available all the time. This specific blossom festival is only truly special to the people that live here in this avenue. Then again, every avenue has their own special something. Maybe it’s some kind of harvest festival, maybe it’s a concert series, maybe it’s a robotics competition. We have one culture of everything all the time but we also have three hundred cultures of local tradition, some drawn from Earth and others new-made in this new place. The connecting lines of Earth still resonate here as well; ancestry and nationality are alive and well in spite of us living on another planet.
Another piece of the puzzle is architecture. Landing is built underground in huge arched vaults which invoke ancient Roman engineering, although with dark basalt instead of light tufa. Stone blocks feel primitive yet precise. Within that envelope are utilitarian spaces like service passages, but also homes and parkways that are much more organic. Our buildings are very rectangular because they must be easy to assemble and make the most of materials. We use very few structural embellishments, so we focus instead on decoration like murals. There is an avenue whose entire set of apartments are painted to look like brick townhouses, complete with real wrought iron door handles. Others reproduce architectural styles of specific areas and periods on Earth, while still more are experimental or graffiti-industrial. Projectors are popular even though they’re expensive to operate. There are a few buildings that might be considered true works of art, mostly places of worship but there’s a bank and a couple of government offices built to their own designs.
I do not actually need to ‘work’ as most people would think of it. Art is a respected profession and activity, fully supported by the settlement government. Not that they need to support it; everyone here has a basic income sufficient to live comfortably. No, I work in hydroponics because I love to work with living things, to grow food to share, to produce my own dyes. You’ll find most of the immigrants here do what they do out of love for the work and for their fellow settlers. Plenty of us enjoy profits too, don’t get me wrong, but a purely capitalist mindset doesn’t really fit in around here. We are a microscopic fragment of the tiny dust speck that is humanity, and if we don’t all work together we will surely fail and die. Strong motivation.
Let’s talk about the mechanics of food. People need macro balance: proteins, fats and carbohydrates in a healthy ratio. We need an array of vitamins and minerals for true health, fiber for digestion, enough calories for energy, and variety to maintain interest. That means we can’t simply pick the best two or three crops and grow them like crazy; there has to be a wide selection of species. That said, there are some keystone crops that make this all possible and one of them is the peanut. Rich in fat and protein, peanuts balance the otherwise carb-heavy nature of good producers like wheat and potato. Peanuts are far more productive than soybeans for a given area, and space matters a lot here. Also important: how long can a given crop be stored? I can grow a year’s worth of fresh strawberries in three months, but they won’t be fresh for long. A field of dry beans can be harvested and stored for a decade if handled properly.
That leads to the major split. We have a huge area of surface greenhouses with natural light; these are long plastic tubes. They have enough sun for crops through about half the year, maybe a little more; we can grow a lot of food without using much energy, and all that surface area acts as radiators for the settlement. That’s where we grow the nice, predictable things like wheat that all reach maturity at the same time and can be kept for a few years. Beans, peanuts and wheat are the big three, with smaller amounts of barley, oats, corn, soybeans, rice and a few others like hemp for fiber. The problem is, the surface is exposed to radiation. Enough to matter if you’re spending hours a day with no protection. I sometimes bid for shifts in a service tunnel, a long building buried under a few meters of soil. Each greenhouse tube connects to a service tunnel at both ends. Crops are grown on pallets that get pulled through the greenhouse on a cable system; we can pull them into the service tunnel for harvest. Same for most of the equipment; it can be retracted for repairs. The sheeting needs replaced every few years anyway due to UV damage and abrasion, so we don’t have to go crazy with redundancy in the rest of the systems. Everything is automated as much as possible including a machine vision system for monitoring crops and automatic harvesters, seeders and pollinators. With all that technology we can be about as productive per person as a big-field midwestern farmer with heavy equipment.
The other half of the split is energy-intensive growing. Full LED lights, environmental control, whatever it takes for good productivity. If we did everything this way we would need about 40 m³ per person. We actually have a little more than that below plus the surface greenhouses for grains and the parkways for trees and shrubs; that gives us some room to deal with issues like pythium or poor yields and to grow things that are ornamental or experimental. Since each avenue is its own little ecosystem we can isolate diseases and pests before they spread to the whole settlement.
Variety. There are over a thousand varieties of Capsicum in our gardens for example; I brought four family favorites with me, two of which are unique in Landing. Almost every person grows at least a few things for personal use, and all of us are trained in food production. We’re trained to maintain life support systems, render first aid, travel outside in a suit and a half dozen other things as well in order to qualify as citizens (or voting shareholders if you prefer).
There are a few niche uses for our food systems and one of them is to produce starch or sugar for fermentation. Yes that means alcohol for human consumption, but more importantly it means recombinant bacteria or fungi for manufacturing proteins, antibodies and other hard-to-synthesize compounds. Vaccination is still important and our pharmacopeia includes biologics that would be very difficult to produce the traditional way. We have the capacity to make all essential amino acids in enough quantity to keep the entire settlement healthy if our protein-heavy crops were to collapse. We could survive on nothing but potatoes and synthetics if it were absolutely necessary. As you might imagine that also means we have a competent team of geneticists and the necessary equipment for analysis and alterations. Genetic sequences and related research are among our exports; the shipping costs of data are quite reasonable compared to Martian rock sculptures.
We export food to other settlements, to asteroid miners, anyone operating away from Earth. We grow heirloom cultivars and store seed as a backup genetic bank. We develop new strains optimized for hypogravity or high radiation. We also express our history and share in the histories of our fellow settlers through our food.
The Shipwright
It’s funny to call myself a Martian when I’ve never set foot on the surface, but I do. The Red Planet and her residents have my loyalty. My Starship flight was one of the first crewed aerocaptures. We went straight to the jobsite at Deimos and I’ve been too busy to take a surface vacation ever since. Maybe I’ll retire to a nice place in Landing some day and destroy the college kids in their robotics contests.
It might sound a little crazy to build a moon base orbiting another planet. Maybe it is a little crazy, but so what? Let me tell you a little about our history and you can decide for yourself.
I was a young space enthusiast back in the 2020’s, rooting for SpaceX. I got involved, networked with people, researched things and taught myself as much as I could. The first successful Mars landing was like nothing my generation had ever seen; not even the modern lunar landings caused as much excitement. Musk’s company built Alpha and the new gold rush kicked off. This was a time when major internationals had hundreds of billions of dollars sitting around in cash; they’d already bought back most of their available stock and had nothing better to invest it in. Not even the simultaneous pandemic, recession and social upheaval made much of a dent, yet shareholders were clamoring for more value with no plausible investments in sight. Enter Mars.
By 2030 we the general public had everything we needed to settle permanently on Mars except money. All the necessary tech had been developed, construction techniques were proven and we had a reliable ride to and from. What we needed were settlers, but they needed a place to go and someone to take care of the logistics. Enter the New Mars Cooperative. A couple of people running gold-rush businesses got together with a group of enthusiasts and built a business plan for a sustainable settlement. The pitch was so good we convinced SpaceX to commit a sizeable portion of their Starlink profits towards the project. With an anchor investor locked down we were able to sign up settlers, business owners and outside investors. Every ticketholder became a shareholder and a voting member; pure investors were given nonvoting stock. Down payments paid for experts who designed the major settlement systems and built the first industrial avenues. The first few waves were people like me who volunteered to work in base construction and bootstrap jobs, but after that it was a firehose. We crossed 950k people in Landing during the most recent transit window (2056); it’s no New York or Mexico City but we’re the biggest settlement off Earth by a lot. Counting the minor surface outposts and the Deimos shipyard we’re just over a million people.
We’ve averaged about a million dollars per person, with costs dropping over time as we fill out our industry. That’s a solid trillion dollars so far. Half that amount has been the cost of things we’ve shipped here, including custom development and remote support. A quarter was the cost of shipping all that expensive cargo, and the remainder was the cost of shipping all the people. The next million people should cost around $300k each, maybe a bit less. After that it depends on whether we can find a cheaper way to ship people because we’ve already become as self-sufficient as we can afford to be until we get much larger.
Where did all the money come from, you might ask? Well, 40% off the top came from the settlers themselves. $250k each for a ticket plus $150k each on average in sponsored hardware works out to $400 billion. The number two investor was SpaceX, who set aside $11 billion a year out of Starlink profits. That’s $374 billion to date. All other companies and investment firms together account for 30% of overall cargo, or $225 billion. We’ve made about $26 billion in contracts with NASA, ESA and others for hosting their astronauts, running experiments and providing samples. We build and export space hardware that I’ll explain in a minute, to the tune of $25 billion so far and growing sharply. Our mineral exports stand at $8.4 billion to date; not a lot but critical to our self-sufficiency. If you’re keeping track you’ll notice that adds up to about $58 billion extra which paid for some custom development and serves as a cash reserve in case of emergencies.
Investors are not getting their returns from the settlement management directly. We are a financial success only because investors are not looking for short-term cash. Their buy-in grants them control of a share of the settlement’s resources, the excess of which they can sell or trade as they see fit. In theory we might offer cash dividends some day to the pure investors but for now we reinvest everything we can into infrastructure. SpaceX for the most part seems content to let their shares be reinvested since this settlement represents their overarching purpose as a company. A lot of their people retire here. Some companies went all-in on Mars and have their headquarters in Landing, making money on local trade without really making anything back on Earth. Sort of a ‘corporate immigration’ one might say. I know of one that imported a huge variety of fruit and nut trees early on and cornered the market; they have competition now but their trees are more mature and productive. Others are taking a long view on returns, either keeping a place for themselves later or betting on the settlement’s long-term success. Still others are working exports to try to cash in on Earth’s interest in everything Mars. Essentially, if you want to profit on Earth from an investment on Mars you’re either selling something to a Martian immigrant before they leave or you’re making your own business opportunities out of your cut of the resources. This approach favors genuine entrepreneurs and discourages toxic finance tactics. The exception that proves the rule here is filmmaking, or perhaps I should say creative works in general. Mars provides a unique environment with resources and qualities not found anywhere else, and there are some who turn that into movies, books or other works that sell well back on Earth.
Most of the investment money came from the settlers themselves, and the two main benefits of that are a basic income and a vote. Anyone born in an NMC facility or in transit gets the same. Government is a complex topic; technically everyone here is still a citizen of whatever nation they or their parents came from. NMC acts like a local government with elections for most senior management and board positions and referendums for regulations. They host observers from several nations and the UN to ensure things are kept above-board. Shareholders voluntarily agree to be bound by local law and served by local courts with elected magistrates. Our population is small enough for direct democracy and we use that often. Questions are usually formulated by the board of directors, which is a quasi-representative system, but you can petition your way into a general vote if there’s enough interest. We are on track to become politically independent but there’s a formidable series of barriers to overcome including pre-emptive trade and security treaties. We wouldn’t be able to import certain parts under ITAR restrictions for example. We would also need to somehow be recognized by the UN including the entire security council, which is rather unlikely given the historical animosity amongst permanent members.
Settling another planet is a major effort. Even with the enormous cargo capacity available we were sharply limited in the per-person mass we could take from Earth. The first order of business was to establish industrial capacity to build more industry to build the facilities we needed. Iron was easy and carbon was available so we used a lot of steel. After the initial ISRU plant and steel mill were up and running we built a basic thin-film plant for PV cells. The chemical section was expanded to produce a few key polymers. Solar furnaces for basalt and silica provided glass and structural elements. Between that, hydroponics and water recycling we’d cut our Earth dependence by about 95% within the first few trips. The remaining 5% are vastly more challenging.
Take copper for example. It’s possible to build motors and wiring without copper, but the results are bulkier and more wasteful. Copper mines on Earth are enormous open-pit affairs that tap into porphyry deposits, which are basically volcanic hydrothermal remnants. There might be similar deposits on Mars but until we find some all our copper has to be imported. Same for gallium, germanium, tin and two dozen other things. We had to get our essential plant nutrients from the surface dust at great effort or from Earth at great cost. That’s where I come in.
With the right approach every metal, rare earth and semiconductor can be had without shipping from Earth. There are huge quantities in the asteroid belt. This facility on Deimos acts as a dock for low-thrust ships traveling to or from Mars. We have a tether system that can ease the departure and arrival delta-v by quite a bit, and by moving cargo from SEP ships to chemical ships for the landing those low-thrust ships don’t have to waste time spiraling in or out of low orbit. Landing supplies us with argon for propellant and polymers for structures, not to mention food and life support supplies.
We build SEP ships with small crews in shielded rotating habitats. These ships go on three-year tours, mostly to 16 Psyche. The facility there processes about two million tonnes of metallic asteroid a year. There’s a neat trick with carbon monoxide: under heat and pressure it dissolves iron, nickel and cobalt into metal carbonyls which can be distilled to separate them. That takes a lot less energy than melting or electrorefining even though it’s a complicated fluid-based process. Since a metallic body like Psyche is around 95% nickel-iron we’re already at 20x concentration for everything else. That’s copper, platinum, tungsten, tin, germanium, everything we need. Roast off sulfides, volatiles and lead beforehand and you’re approaching 100:1. At that point the concentrations of rare elements start looking positively bountiful, which justifies more aggressive extraction methods. This concentrate gets acid leached and then zone refined in solar furnaces with spinning receivers, which lets us extract pretty much everything of value. The iron and nickel is left behind; we have plenty of iron on Mars and limited payload capacity, about a thousand tonnes per 39-month window at the moment. Maybe some day we’ll have a need for a few tens of millions of tonnes of pure iron out at 2.9 AU, but for now it’s a waste pile. The PGMs are valuable; we take those along with technical metals, copper and semiconductors back here to Deimos. Most of the PGMs are sent to Earth for trade which helps pay for the things we need to import. We keep some for catalysts, of course, and everything else we need for industry is sent to Landing. This slice of business would be risky and low-yield by itself, but as part of a combined strategy it’s a powerful lever that lifts us further towards self-sufficiency.
Once we had a microgravity shipyard we were able to build more than just our own mining ships. We built ships for other asteroid mining firms, deep-space probes for space agencies and giant comms dishes for anyone that needs them. Those are all interesting, but our most important product has been orbital habitats. We use them ourselves; the habitat modules here on Deimos are big cylinders that are spun for gravity. They are anchored in deep pits facing Mars so they’re fully shielded against GCR and solar storms. The ones we sell can be built with or without shielding: water, regolith, layered-Z, whatever the customer needs. We’ve built six-person transit habs for the belt, six-thousand-person orbitals for Lagrange point colonies and everything in between. Mars provides the water, nutrients and nitrogen for life support plus the argon for propellant and polymers for structure. Our belt mines provide the metals for thrusters, wiring and other mechanisms. Most of the computer hardware is imported from Earth. We can even be competitive with lunar construction companies since so much more of the mass is local, especially for customers who need delivery to the belt. It’s easier and cheaper to launch mass from Mars to Deimos than it is from Earth to Luna. It’s a point of pride that we would be profitable if we were spun off, as long as a Martian surface settlement could sell supplies at a fair price.
There are forty thousand people living and working on Deimos. We’re a small slice of the Martian population, but the work we do is opening up the rest of the solar system to settlement and closing the loop for self-sufficiency on Mars. Landing is properly city-sized at just under a million people. Another ten thousand of us are scattered across surface outposts. A whole network of ISRU sites allows us to make suborbital hops from place to place with a few Starship vehicles; we can reach anywhere on Mars for exploration. We’re not the only ones building settlements, but we have the best infrastructure for trade. Our future is bright.
Let me tell you a story of how we might settle Mars. We will hear from a handful of people in the 2050s, the decade when our permanent population passes one million. Up first is a young engineer, recently immigrated, who will introduce us to the main settlement and describe living conditions from a hardware-centric perspective. Next is an artist and hydroponics specialist who will talk about culture and food. Last is a shipyard manager, one of the first settlers, to talk a bit more history, economics and solar system access. This is not a blueprint or a business plan, but I hope it serves as inspiration for what could be.
The Engineer
By the end of the 2020’s, SpaceX established a permanent base called Alpha to the northwest of Olympus Mons. With glacial ice close at hand and absurdly cheap ticket prices, demand from space agencies across Earth was huge. Cash poured in by the tens of billions. Astronauts came and explored, a communications network was established and a new frontier was opened for innovation. A new gold rush ensued, with hundreds of companies vying to be the new leader in some tech or another. Fortunes were risked, won and lost. Mistakes were made and people died. We’re human though, and we don’t give up.
Alpha was never going to be the center of civilization on Mars. Too far north for easy power and too far away from anything interesting. Seriously, Arcadia Planitia is a wasteland; Alpha is next to the only hill for almost a thousand kilometers. I’ve been out there on the suborbital shuttle for my propulsion engineering internship and the only things they have going for them are incredible coffee and the best engine team in the solar system.
Home sweet home is Landing, our little slice of dust over in Isidis Planitia. There was never an actual ‘colony ship’ so the name is sort of a reference to old science fiction settlements. We’re at N18 E80 more or less, so the winters aren’t nearly as brutal as Alpha. Air’s nice and thick for landings but we’re a short drive from some pretty rough highland terrain and a lot of weird chemistry. Weird like carbonates and methane seeps which you wouldn’t normally expect on a dead rock; the space agencies on Earth can’t get enough of it even after all this time. The founders thought water would be easy but we have to truck it almost 500 km from glaciers in Nilosyrtis Mensae; it’s a good thing we have self-driving cargo rovers.
Landing is huge. There’s about 42 square kilometers of solar panels, but the loose packing means we’re spread across a bit under 90 km² on the surface. They get 20% efficiency mostly; they could be better but these thin films are easy to make and there’s plenty of real estate up there.
We could have built a giant city dome and lived in futuristic splendor but then one accident could have ended the whole project. Instead we went wide; there are about three hundred ‘avenues’, self-contained underground neighborhoods of around four thousand people connected by transit tunnels. If you can make it two kilometers on foot you can get anywhere in the city and then some. Along with the neighborhood habs, there are industrial avenues built the same way. Dangerous things like the steel mills and the hydrocarbon factories are kept isolated and redundant.
The neighborhoods themselves are hacked out of the flood basalt. First a dragline takes out any loose material, then a roadheader cuts down to good solid rock. After that the rock saws go to work cutting out clean structural blocks. The whole process is mostly automated; humans handle goal-setting, maintenance and occasional patches that don’t scan well. We’ve tried blasting with oxyliquit and nitrogen-based explosives and still use them sometimes, but it’s dangerous and tends to fracture the stone we want. Excavation goes to about 40 meters depth with some foundation work, soundings and the like. After that they move in a big steel frame with rollers to hold blocks in place while the vault is built up with cranes; it gets winched forwards after each course is finished. An inventory management system keeps track of the blocks from quarrying to testing and placement; it’s fully autonomous until something breaks.
The vault is a parabolic arch about 33 meters wide (inside), 18 meters tall and 1.8 kilometers long. Each avenue is two vaults side by side with passages between them; if there’s a problem in one vault everyone can be evacuated to the other one. Each end of the avenue has a transit terminal connected to the rest of the network. Once the transit tunnels are in place the whole thing is sprayed inside and out with a fiber-reinforced polymer sealant to make it airtight, leak tested, then it’s buried under 20 meters of gravel and pressure tested. The vaults are built so they are under compressive load even with a full bar of air pressure inside; with no freeze-thaw cycle and no active tectonics they will last for centuries at least.
Inside those giant vaults is a lot of empty space. 33 meters is huge; that’s about a hundred feet wide. We can build anything in there which is great for the industrial stuff, but most of the space is for people. We’ve got a pretty big steel industry so that is the major structural material: steel beams for load with steel-faced structural insulated panels (SIPs) for surfaces. SIPs have a foam core that cuts down on noise. They’re also really easy to build with; a two-person crew can frame and rough an apartment in half an hour or so. Now inside this vault we build two rows of apartments three floors high, which is nine meters tall and nine meters deep. There’s a nine meter space left open between the two and a pair of three meter spaces in a weird wedge shape at the outside edges of the arch. The wedge shape gets used for utilities and access. That central open space is part plaza, part park, part orchard; we just call it the parkway even though that means something else on Earth. Most parkways have a viewing stand at either end so you can see almost two kilometers away; that and the super tall ceilings seem to help with feelings of confinement underground. The trees help too. In the apartment blocks, about half of the first-floor space is for businesses or services and the rest is housing. Every unit has a view of the parkway. Some of the space above the third floor is used for hydroponics with LED lights, mainly the stuff that’s hard to automate or has continuous harvests. The peak of the arch itself sometimes has murals painted or projected on; my zone has movie nights once a week where we can lay on the grass patch and watch on the ceiling.
Hab avenues have big surface greenhouses for grains and other ‘predictable’ crops. Access is through airlocked elevators at the transit stations; these go up to a service tunnel at the surface that runs the whole length of the avenue. Surface service tunnels are usually fabric pressure vessels buried under a few meters of dirt for radiation shielding. The greenhouses themselves are plastic and kept at low pressures; all the crops are in plastic trays on a cable system so people don’t have to take a dose just to go make repairs. Planting, tending and harvest is almost completely automated. Surface stuff, especially the plastic sheeting, takes a beating and has to be replaced every few years thanks to UV damage and dust abrasion. It’s thermoplastic so recycling is pretty easy, but every bit of maintenance adds up and detoxing all the dust is annoying.
Past the greenhouses on both sides are the PV tents. These are thin film PV blankets draped over a tension cable; the tent shape gets us better power production over the course of the day than a flat panel, keeps the cells cooler and cuts down on dust accumulation. All good things for efficiency, although the tension lines take steel and labor to set up. One reason for building avenues is the DC wiring from the arrays is a lot shorter than it would be for a central plant, so our transmission losses are less. Almost everything runs on DC power within an avenue, but Landing’s main grid is high voltage AC wired through the transit tunnels. There’s a substation at each transit terminal so power can be distributed anywhere. Power storage is mostly handled by block cranes; moving large basalt blocks up or down can store and recover electricity efficiently enough for our needs and with no rare materials like lithium required. These are built along the transit lines for connectivity and stocked with excess blocks from excavation projects. Each avenue needs about 2.7 square kilometers of panels, but the loose packing means we need about 3.8 km² of real estate. We could put avenues about three kilometers apart but that leaves no room for future expansion; instead they are spaced by about 5km.
Industry runs on a seasonal cycle. Spring and summer have excellent weather and sunlight so that’s when we do the power-hungry work like making steel and spinning basalt fiber. Fall is dust season and winter sun is dim so we focus on things that need more time or labor than power. The Martian year is about 1.88 times Earth’s year so those seasons are almost six months long. The residential grid is sized for winter so spring and summer average about 430 GWh of excess power per day. That sounds like a lot but the dim seasons generate about 2 kilowatt-hours per day per square meter of panels vs. 3.5 kWh/m² for the bright. Each person needs about 520 kWh per day to cover food, life support and environmental control which works out to 1,764 m² each at a target productivity of 2 kWh/m². (If ~45 kW for twelve hours per person sounds like a lot of power, remember that our life support is a closed system outside of leaks; that’s a very challenging set of problems and some of the solutions require a lot of juice.) Multiply that area by a million people and 1.5 kWh/m² of surplus, subtract a safety factor and storage loss and you end up with a lot of power left over for industrial applications.
Let’s quickly run down the major industrial systems:
- Easily the biggest consumers of power are the propellant factories. The current demand is about 50 GWh per day to produce methane and oxygen for Earth-bound Starships, Deimos taxi flights and suborbital flights. Production is sun-season only; propellant gets stored in huge insulated tanks underground where it doesn’t take much power to maintain.
- Next largest is the power storage cranes. They stack blocks during the day and lower them to the ground at night, taking advantage of gravity to run the lift motors as generators. It’s less efficient than a similar system on Earth would be, but it requires the least mass from Earth which makes it the cheapest option for us.
- We make about 250 tonnes of steel a day for another GWh or so. It starts as iron-rich surface dust that gets hydrogen reduced and purified by the Mond process. The dust is super-fine so we don’t have to do any grinding, just a sift and a preheat pass to bake out any volatiles and sulfur. Melting and alloying is done in an electric arc furnace. On good sun days we might use surface solar furnaces for part of the process heat. We mill bar, plate and sheet stock for the most part but we also make finely divided iron and iron pentacarbonyl for 3d printing.
- Plastics output is another 250 tonnes daily; this is actually part of a larger hydrocarbon production process based on gas-to-liquids tech that also makes lubricants, soap base (dodecanol) and pharmaceutical feedstocks. Most of our textiles are synthetic and that’s one output of this section. We try to stick to aliphatic polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene but there are some use cases that need aromatic rings; Nomex is a good example, which is used in some habitat systems for heat, chemical and abrasion resistance. We don’t use chlorinated polymers like PVC and we restrict anything that makes toxic fumes to the bare minimum.
- Similar hydrogen-based chemical systems handle nitrogen (Fischer-Tropsch for ammonia) and silicon (silane for polysilicone and semiconductors) in bulk. There’s a wide variety of smaller thermal and electrochemical processes running too including chloralkali for lye plus hydrogen chloride, and Hall-Héroult for aluminum and a few other metals. At the smallest end are a team of bench chemists and chemical engineers that can batch-produce almost anything given enough time; these experts are split among resource production, reclamation and pharmaceutical lines.
- We have dedicated PV cell plants making thin-films for deployment on the surface. Most are some variation of plasma deposition or CVD but we experiment constantly. The easiest backing material is iron with an aluminum film, although we also use glass and polymers as supports with various conductors. We use both indium-tin-oxide and diamond-like-carbon as front contacts depending on availability of indium. Much of our production is tandem cells with amorphous silicon PIN for infrared and titanium perovskite for visible wavelengths since the materials are readily available.
- There is a small silicon foundry for power electronics, phased array elements, monocrystalline silicon PV and MEMS. We’re working on modernizing process nodes down to full microprocessors right now but some of the manufacturing steps are hard to redesign with fully recyclable reagents. Invaluable support towards that effort has come from Earth-based foundries who want to reduce hazardous wastes and consumable reagents for cost and environmental reasons. We’re also prototyping multijunction designs for high-efficiency cells as an export product and for use at surface outposts. The zone refining equipment here is also used to make very high purity samples and to separate things like PGM alloys into their component elements for making catalysts.
- One of the more spectacular jobs is melting basalt in the big solar furnaces; that gets turned into pipes, tiles, reinforcing fibers and rockwool. The pipes are great for slurry or glacial melt thanks to the crazy abrasion resistance. Fibers form the reinforcement in our hab liner. Rockwool can be used for insulation, but we mostly use it as a hydroponic growth medium. That same equipment is used to make glass too, which is mostly decorative plate with some used in appliances, dishes and utensils. Iron dust is a problem; a lot of our glass is a bit green.
- There’s also resource reclamation, which extracts everything useful out of sewage sludge and spent ores alike. It may sound like an unpleasant job but you get to do a lot of cool chemistry and there are running competitions to develop new extraction processes. My bunkmate on the flight out works there and she’s already published a paper on phosphorus extraction from spent iron ores. Mines back on Earth sometimes use techniques we’ve developed to squeeze some extra value out of their tailings or slag.
Residential services are modern. We have a pressurized water system, vacuum toilets and vacuum grey water. Each avenue recycles and UV-sterilizes its own greywater, but sludge gets shipped out to Reclamation to extract nutrients. Apartments have power and optical data lines, a heat pump for temperature and humidity control and an emergency CO2 sorbent bed. Dishwashers and clothes washers save time. Showers have heat recovery so you can use quite a bit of hot water. Hot plates are made locally if you want to cook for yourself but most people eat at a self-serve cafeteria for hot meals or use a public kitchen with all the cool tools. Snacking on vegetables is encouraged; menus are plant-heavy but we do raise fish and chickens. Mail and deliveries are by cargo bot most of the time and all packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable. My apartment is much nicer than my dorm was, and there’s way more to do here than any other place I’ve been.
The Artist
What is culture? The things you do every day or at specific times, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the way you talk, the way things are built. When you share these things with a community you are part of a cultural experience. I believe that food is the foundation of culture. The ingredients available, the ancient recipes, the modern twists: these things are even better than language at identifying cultural ties. At the core of food is of course plants, but they go far beyond this. Traditional textiles and dyes were plant-based. Festivals and schedules revolved around growth cycles, as do many religions. People describe my creative works as sculpture or murals, but I think of myself more as a farmer or gardener than a painter or sculptor. My pieces explore cultural roots and their expressions in new environments; Mars was a natural progression for me. I have murals in several avenues and I’ve exported both ceramic and glass pieces back to Earth.
What is the culture of Mars? There is no one answer to that question, but I can tell you what I see. Outside my window is a Prunus orchard: ornamental Sakura cherry trees are in full bloom, overshadowing the small but still beautiful flowers of fruit cherry trees in their training frames with attendant honeybees. They are raised together to improve pollination and yields, but they also bring a small piece of Japan to Landing. Just like on Earth a whole festival season is organized around the blooms; restaurants offer Japanese-inspired meals, tourists travel to see the sights, children hear stories and learn traditional crafts. The difference here is, this is just one of a dozen avenues with cherries and for various reasons none of them bloom at the same time. Things blend. Time and season are under our direct control. We make the things we enjoy become available all the time. This specific blossom festival is only truly special to the people that live here in this avenue. Then again, every avenue has their own special something. Maybe it’s some kind of harvest festival, maybe it’s a concert series, maybe it’s a robotics competition. We have one culture of everything all the time but we also have three hundred cultures of local tradition, some drawn from Earth and others new-made in this new place. The connecting lines of Earth still resonate here as well; ancestry and nationality are alive and well in spite of us living on another planet.
Another piece of the puzzle is architecture. Landing is built underground in huge arched vaults which invoke ancient Roman engineering, although with dark basalt instead of light tufa. Stone blocks feel primitive yet precise. Within that envelope are utilitarian spaces like service passages, but also homes and parkways that are much more organic. Our buildings are very rectangular because they must be easy to assemble and make the most of materials. We use very few structural embellishments, so we focus instead on decoration like murals. There is an avenue whose entire set of apartments are painted to look like brick townhouses, complete with real wrought iron door handles. Others reproduce architectural styles of specific areas and periods on Earth, while still more are experimental or graffiti-industrial. Projectors are popular even though they’re expensive to operate. There are a few buildings that might be considered true works of art, mostly places of worship but there’s a bank and a couple of government offices built to their own designs.
I do not actually need to ‘work’ as most people would think of it. Art is a respected profession and activity, fully supported by the settlement government. Not that they need to support it; everyone here has a basic income sufficient to live comfortably. No, I work in hydroponics because I love to work with living things, to grow food to share, to produce my own dyes. You’ll find most of the immigrants here do what they do out of love for the work and for their fellow settlers. Plenty of us enjoy profits too, don’t get me wrong, but a purely capitalist mindset doesn’t really fit in around here. We are a microscopic fragment of the tiny dust speck that is humanity, and if we don’t all work together we will surely fail and die. Strong motivation.
Let’s talk about the mechanics of food. People need macro balance: proteins, fats and carbohydrates in a healthy ratio. We need an array of vitamins and minerals for true health, fiber for digestion, enough calories for energy, and variety to maintain interest. That means we can’t simply pick the best two or three crops and grow them like crazy; there has to be a wide selection of species. That said, there are some keystone crops that make this all possible and one of them is the peanut. Rich in fat and protein, peanuts balance the otherwise carb-heavy nature of good producers like wheat and potato. Peanuts are far more productive than soybeans for a given area, and space matters a lot here. Also important: how long can a given crop be stored? I can grow a year’s worth of fresh strawberries in three months, but they won’t be fresh for long. A field of dry beans can be harvested and stored for a decade if handled properly.
That leads to the major split. We have a huge area of surface greenhouses with natural light; these are long plastic tubes. They have enough sun for crops through about half the year, maybe a little more; we can grow a lot of food without using much energy, and all that surface area acts as radiators for the settlement. That’s where we grow the nice, predictable things like wheat that all reach maturity at the same time and can be kept for a few years. Beans, peanuts and wheat are the big three, with smaller amounts of barley, oats, corn, soybeans, rice and a few others like hemp for fiber. The problem is, the surface is exposed to radiation. Enough to matter if you’re spending hours a day with no protection. I sometimes bid for shifts in a service tunnel, a long building buried under a few meters of soil. Each greenhouse tube connects to a service tunnel at both ends. Crops are grown on pallets that get pulled through the greenhouse on a cable system; we can pull them into the service tunnel for harvest. Same for most of the equipment; it can be retracted for repairs. The sheeting needs replaced every few years anyway due to UV damage and abrasion, so we don’t have to go crazy with redundancy in the rest of the systems. Everything is automated as much as possible including a machine vision system for monitoring crops and automatic harvesters, seeders and pollinators. With all that technology we can be about as productive per person as a big-field midwestern farmer with heavy equipment.
The other half of the split is energy-intensive growing. Full LED lights, environmental control, whatever it takes for good productivity. If we did everything this way we would need about 40 m³ per person. We actually have a little more than that below plus the surface greenhouses for grains and the parkways for trees and shrubs; that gives us some room to deal with issues like pythium or poor yields and to grow things that are ornamental or experimental. Since each avenue is its own little ecosystem we can isolate diseases and pests before they spread to the whole settlement.
Variety. There are over a thousand varieties of Capsicum in our gardens for example; I brought four family favorites with me, two of which are unique in Landing. Almost every person grows at least a few things for personal use, and all of us are trained in food production. We’re trained to maintain life support systems, render first aid, travel outside in a suit and a half dozen other things as well in order to qualify as citizens (or voting shareholders if you prefer).
There are a few niche uses for our food systems and one of them is to produce starch or sugar for fermentation. Yes that means alcohol for human consumption, but more importantly it means recombinant bacteria or fungi for manufacturing proteins, antibodies and other hard-to-synthesize compounds. Vaccination is still important and our pharmacopeia includes biologics that would be very difficult to produce the traditional way. We have the capacity to make all essential amino acids in enough quantity to keep the entire settlement healthy if our protein-heavy crops were to collapse. We could survive on nothing but potatoes and synthetics if it were absolutely necessary. As you might imagine that also means we have a competent team of geneticists and the necessary equipment for analysis and alterations. Genetic sequences and related research are among our exports; the shipping costs of data are quite reasonable compared to Martian rock sculptures.
We export food to other settlements, to asteroid miners, anyone operating away from Earth. We grow heirloom cultivars and store seed as a backup genetic bank. We develop new strains optimized for hypogravity or high radiation. We also express our history and share in the histories of our fellow settlers through our food.
The Shipwright
It’s funny to call myself a Martian when I’ve never set foot on the surface, but I do. The Red Planet and her residents have my loyalty. My Starship flight was one of the first crewed aerocaptures. We went straight to the jobsite at Deimos and I’ve been too busy to take a surface vacation ever since. Maybe I’ll retire to a nice place in Landing some day and destroy the college kids in their robotics contests.
It might sound a little crazy to build a moon base orbiting another planet. Maybe it is a little crazy, but so what? Let me tell you a little about our history and you can decide for yourself.
I was a young space enthusiast back in the 2020’s, rooting for SpaceX. I got involved, networked with people, researched things and taught myself as much as I could. The first successful Mars landing was like nothing my generation had ever seen; not even the modern lunar landings caused as much excitement. Musk’s company built Alpha and the new gold rush kicked off. This was a time when major internationals had hundreds of billions of dollars sitting around in cash; they’d already bought back most of their available stock and had nothing better to invest it in. Not even the simultaneous pandemic, recession and social upheaval made much of a dent, yet shareholders were clamoring for more value with no plausible investments in sight. Enter Mars.
By 2030 we the general public had everything we needed to settle permanently on Mars except money. All the necessary tech had been developed, construction techniques were proven and we had a reliable ride to and from. What we needed were settlers, but they needed a place to go and someone to take care of the logistics. Enter the New Mars Cooperative. A couple of people running gold-rush businesses got together with a group of enthusiasts and built a business plan for a sustainable settlement. The pitch was so good we convinced SpaceX to commit a sizeable portion of their Starlink profits towards the project. With an anchor investor locked down we were able to sign up settlers, business owners and outside investors. Every ticketholder became a shareholder and a voting member; pure investors were given nonvoting stock. Down payments paid for experts who designed the major settlement systems and built the first industrial avenues. The first few waves were people like me who volunteered to work in base construction and bootstrap jobs, but after that it was a firehose. We crossed 950k people in Landing during the most recent transit window (2056); it’s no New York or Mexico City but we’re the biggest settlement off Earth by a lot. Counting the minor surface outposts and the Deimos shipyard we’re just over a million people.
We’ve averaged about a million dollars per person, with costs dropping over time as we fill out our industry. That’s a solid trillion dollars so far. Half that amount has been the cost of things we’ve shipped here, including custom development and remote support. A quarter was the cost of shipping all that expensive cargo, and the remainder was the cost of shipping all the people. The next million people should cost around $300k each, maybe a bit less. After that it depends on whether we can find a cheaper way to ship people because we’ve already become as self-sufficient as we can afford to be until we get much larger.
Where did all the money come from, you might ask? Well, 40% off the top came from the settlers themselves. $250k each for a ticket plus $150k each on average in sponsored hardware works out to $400 billion. The number two investor was SpaceX, who set aside $11 billion a year out of Starlink profits. That’s $374 billion to date. All other companies and investment firms together account for 30% of overall cargo, or $225 billion. We’ve made about $26 billion in contracts with NASA, ESA and others for hosting their astronauts, running experiments and providing samples. We build and export space hardware that I’ll explain in a minute, to the tune of $25 billion so far and growing sharply. Our mineral exports stand at $8.4 billion to date; not a lot but critical to our self-sufficiency. If you’re keeping track you’ll notice that adds up to about $58 billion extra which paid for some custom development and serves as a cash reserve in case of emergencies.
Investors are not getting their returns from the settlement management directly. We are a financial success only because investors are not looking for short-term cash. Their buy-in grants them control of a share of the settlement’s resources, the excess of which they can sell or trade as they see fit. In theory we might offer cash dividends some day to the pure investors but for now we reinvest everything we can into infrastructure. SpaceX for the most part seems content to let their shares be reinvested since this settlement represents their overarching purpose as a company. A lot of their people retire here. Some companies went all-in on Mars and have their headquarters in Landing, making money on local trade without really making anything back on Earth. Sort of a ‘corporate immigration’ one might say. I know of one that imported a huge variety of fruit and nut trees early on and cornered the market; they have competition now but their trees are more mature and productive. Others are taking a long view on returns, either keeping a place for themselves later or betting on the settlement’s long-term success. Still others are working exports to try to cash in on Earth’s interest in everything Mars. Essentially, if you want to profit on Earth from an investment on Mars you’re either selling something to a Martian immigrant before they leave or you’re making your own business opportunities out of your cut of the resources. This approach favors genuine entrepreneurs and discourages toxic finance tactics. The exception that proves the rule here is filmmaking, or perhaps I should say creative works in general. Mars provides a unique environment with resources and qualities not found anywhere else, and there are some who turn that into movies, books or other works that sell well back on Earth.
Most of the investment money came from the settlers themselves, and the two main benefits of that are a basic income and a vote. Anyone born in an NMC facility or in transit gets the same. Government is a complex topic; technically everyone here is still a citizen of whatever nation they or their parents came from. NMC acts like a local government with elections for most senior management and board positions and referendums for regulations. They host observers from several nations and the UN to ensure things are kept above-board. Shareholders voluntarily agree to be bound by local law and served by local courts with elected magistrates. Our population is small enough for direct democracy and we use that often. Questions are usually formulated by the board of directors, which is a quasi-representative system, but you can petition your way into a general vote if there’s enough interest. We are on track to become politically independent but there’s a formidable series of barriers to overcome including pre-emptive trade and security treaties. We wouldn’t be able to import certain parts under ITAR restrictions for example. We would also need to somehow be recognized by the UN including the entire security council, which is rather unlikely given the historical animosity amongst permanent members.
Settling another planet is a major effort. Even with the enormous cargo capacity available we were sharply limited in the per-person mass we could take from Earth. The first order of business was to establish industrial capacity to build more industry to build the facilities we needed. Iron was easy and carbon was available so we used a lot of steel. After the initial ISRU plant and steel mill were up and running we built a basic thin-film plant for PV cells. The chemical section was expanded to produce a few key polymers. Solar furnaces for basalt and silica provided glass and structural elements. Between that, hydroponics and water recycling we’d cut our Earth dependence by about 95% within the first few trips. The remaining 5% are vastly more challenging.
Take copper for example. It’s possible to build motors and wiring without copper, but the results are bulkier and more wasteful. Copper mines on Earth are enormous open-pit affairs that tap into porphyry deposits, which are basically volcanic hydrothermal remnants. There might be similar deposits on Mars but until we find some all our copper has to be imported. Same for gallium, germanium, tin and two dozen other things. We had to get our essential plant nutrients from the surface dust at great effort or from Earth at great cost. That’s where I come in.
With the right approach every metal, rare earth and semiconductor can be had without shipping from Earth. There are huge quantities in the asteroid belt. This facility on Deimos acts as a dock for low-thrust ships traveling to or from Mars. We have a tether system that can ease the departure and arrival delta-v by quite a bit, and by moving cargo from SEP ships to chemical ships for the landing those low-thrust ships don’t have to waste time spiraling in or out of low orbit. Landing supplies us with argon for propellant and polymers for structures, not to mention food and life support supplies.
We build SEP ships with small crews in shielded rotating habitats. These ships go on three-year tours, mostly to 16 Psyche. The facility there processes about two million tonnes of metallic asteroid a year. There’s a neat trick with carbon monoxide: under heat and pressure it dissolves iron, nickel and cobalt into metal carbonyls which can be distilled to separate them. That takes a lot less energy than melting or electrorefining even though it’s a complicated fluid-based process. Since a metallic body like Psyche is around 95% nickel-iron we’re already at 20x concentration for everything else. That’s copper, platinum, tungsten, tin, germanium, everything we need. Roast off sulfides, volatiles and lead beforehand and you’re approaching 100:1. At that point the concentrations of rare elements start looking positively bountiful, which justifies more aggressive extraction methods. This concentrate gets acid leached and then zone refined in solar furnaces with spinning receivers, which lets us extract pretty much everything of value. The iron and nickel is left behind; we have plenty of iron on Mars and limited payload capacity, about a thousand tonnes per 39-month window at the moment. Maybe some day we’ll have a need for a few tens of millions of tonnes of pure iron out at 2.9 AU, but for now it’s a waste pile. The PGMs are valuable; we take those along with technical metals, copper and semiconductors back here to Deimos. Most of the PGMs are sent to Earth for trade which helps pay for the things we need to import. We keep some for catalysts, of course, and everything else we need for industry is sent to Landing. This slice of business would be risky and low-yield by itself, but as part of a combined strategy it’s a powerful lever that lifts us further towards self-sufficiency.
Once we had a microgravity shipyard we were able to build more than just our own mining ships. We built ships for other asteroid mining firms, deep-space probes for space agencies and giant comms dishes for anyone that needs them. Those are all interesting, but our most important product has been orbital habitats. We use them ourselves; the habitat modules here on Deimos are big cylinders that are spun for gravity. They are anchored in deep pits facing Mars so they’re fully shielded against GCR and solar storms. The ones we sell can be built with or without shielding: water, regolith, layered-Z, whatever the customer needs. We’ve built six-person transit habs for the belt, six-thousand-person orbitals for Lagrange point colonies and everything in between. Mars provides the water, nutrients and nitrogen for life support plus the argon for propellant and polymers for structure. Our belt mines provide the metals for thrusters, wiring and other mechanisms. Most of the computer hardware is imported from Earth. We can even be competitive with lunar construction companies since so much more of the mass is local, especially for customers who need delivery to the belt. It’s easier and cheaper to launch mass from Mars to Deimos than it is from Earth to Luna. It’s a point of pride that we would be profitable if we were spun off, as long as a Martian surface settlement could sell supplies at a fair price.
There are forty thousand people living and working on Deimos. We’re a small slice of the Martian population, but the work we do is opening up the rest of the solar system to settlement and closing the loop for self-sufficiency on Mars. Landing is properly city-sized at just under a million people. Another ten thousand of us are scattered across surface outposts. A whole network of ISRU sites allows us to make suborbital hops from place to place with a few Starship vehicles; we can reach anywhere on Mars for exploration. We’re not the only ones building settlements, but we have the best infrastructure for trade. Our future is bright.
Hi Chris! As one MCSD competitor to another, an excellent piece of work! Love the emphasis on orbital infrastructure, it's something I wish my team had the time and manpower to explore.
ReplyDeleteSince the conclusion of the 2020 competition, I've been working with the remnants of our team to solve deeper problems within the Mars colonisation space. We've just launched a project that I very much hope you'd be interested in getting involved with. It's called the Mars Bootstrapping Challenge, and tackles the problem of industrializing Mars for cheap, by running a series of open community challenges to solve specific problems around that broad theme.
Our website is https://www.industrialize-mars.com/, hopefully you've got some time to check it out or drop me any questions at smross106@gmail.com!