Category Archives: Digital Art

The Mars Foundation: "To Arrive, Survive, and Thrive"

Near-term, reliant upon only contemporary technology and human ingenuity, engineers, planetary scientists, and architects work together through the Mars Foundation to create blueprints for our species to permanently settle and thrive on another planet, now.

Plans extend from first footfall to dirt covered surface habs to mountain side settlements. The ultimate goal of the project is to design, fund, and build a thriving, growing, permanent settlement on Mars. The initial goal for the Mars Homestead Project is to identify the core technologies needed for an economical, growing Mars Base built primarily with local materials. Efforts will then be focused on prototype projects of increasing sophistication. These include the selection of existing off-the-shelf equipment which could be used on Mars and the construction of prototypes of new technologies.

Below and above are images of interiors of the tubular surface living quarters and greenhouses expected to be used during the first decade of settlement.

The image below, by Phil Smith, depicts a large, open, multi-story masonry structure located deep within hillsides. Natural sunlight is directed into this area from lightpipes above. A Mars settler leans on the bamboo rail and takes in the view, which includes lush greenery and wide open spaces.

Areas of expertise include: Materials, Structures, Mechanical Systems, Architecture, Agriculture, Nutrition, Process/PSSS, Electrical Systems, I&C, Data/Telecom, EHS, IE, Mars Geology/Topography, Space Transportation, Spacesuits, Systems Integration, and many others.

Some locally derived materials have been examined for initial settlement construction. These materials include locally produced fiberglass – wound on site, metals, masonry – either for un-pressurized shelter or covered with regolith to hold the pressure, polyethylene & other polymers made from ethylene from the CO2 atmosphere, and any plant products – especially if a byproduct of food growth. The MHP team continues to evaluate these options as well as a number of potential alternatives.


If you would like to join their team or help in any way please visit The Mars Foundation’s site at: http://marshome.org/

The Single Most Influential Visual Mars Artist

Carter Emmart is human, check out his Facebook profile picture. Looks like a fun guy climbing out on his monkey tree. Most of us don’t bother to climb, content to spend our lives waiting for permission even to live. As a space advocate with his own understanding of ‘professional,’ Dr. Emmart has become a legendary figure in the space advocacy community: no one has been more influential in promoting humans to Mars through art than Carter Emmart.

No one.

An original founder of the Mars Underground while at the University of Colorado, Carter Emmart has been Director of Astrovisualization at NYC’s Hayden Planetarium since the late 1990s. He has collaborated with visualization teams from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

The American Natural History Museum’s full dome space shows are now playing in world wide distribution. Emmart, who previously worked at NASA Ames Research Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, received his BA in geophysics from the University of Colorado where he was an organizer of the Case for Mars Conference series.

Realistic. Near-term. Human. If you are interested in Mars you have almost certainly seen his definitive, archetypical drawings. Created before CG — black and white, in pencil — they still inspire like no others. Their informed, educational, scientifically literate themes set a standard in Mars Art to which all Mars Artists in any medium aspire.

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The above artwork is from the book, “Strategies for Mars: A Guide to Human Exploration”, a textbook on the issues associated with the human settlement of Mars. Edited by Carol Stoker (NASA Ames Research Center) and Carter Emmart (then at the National Center for Atmospheric Reseach), this ground-breaking text draws together twenty-six individually authored chapters by noted authorities in fields considered crucial for understanding human settlement of Mars.

This book was originally suggested as an idea by the former Thomas O. Paine, NASA administrator from 1968-1970, and Chairman of the National Commission on Space, 1986. He died in 1992, leaving as his last work, a chapter for this book. His design for the Mars flag is shown on the cover being raised by his grandson.

Directed by Carter Emmart, Journey to the Stars is an engrossing, immersive theater experience created by the American Natural History Museum’s astrophysicists, scientific visualization, and media production experts with the cooperation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and more than 40 leading scientists from the United States and abroad.

Featuring extraordinary images from telescopes on the ground and in space and stunning, never-before-seen visualizations of physics-based simulations, the dazzling new Journey to the Stars launches visitors through space and time to experience the life and death of the stars in our night sky, including our own nurturing Sun. Tour familiar stellar formations, explore new celestial mysteries, and discover the fascinating, unfolding story that connects us all to the stars. Those who come along for the journey may never see the night sky in the same way again.

Journey to the Stars, narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg, premiered on July 4, 2009, in the Hayden Planetarium at the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. More information may be found here: http://www.amnh.org/rose/spaceshow/journey/

On your personal computer, straight from the Haden, you can also begin a personal expedition of our magical Galaxy, here: http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/download/

“The Space Show,” hosted by Dr. David Livingston, interviewed Carter Emmart in 2007:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUnGYKcvTLY

And of course a collection of Carter Emmart’s original drawings may be viewed here: http://spot.colorado.edu/~marscase/emmart.html

A hundred years from now Martians living in a thriving vibrant human community will ask what motivated Mars settlement. Who wrote the pictures with a thousand words? Carter Emmart.

Welcome to the Mars Artists Community

Enough is enough: artists can make Mars exploration and settlement favorable to languishing in LEO or cowardly returning to the moon…simply by making the coolest, most cutting-edge, professional space imagery — ENTIRELY — Mars-centric.

The idea is to establish a model library copyrighted solely for creation of Mars imagery — but, otherwise open to use by any contributing artist or studio. Since 3D modeling is extremely labor intensive an artists’ cooperative centered upon developing Martian vehicles, habitats, and astronauts, will lower the cost of high-quality creative iterations by artists taking advantage of free Mars Only models. With a library of easily modified Mars Only models, through trial and error of creative processes, Mars Only productions will evolve to be of higher-quality, more pervasive, expressive, and cool!

This is in addition to the self-selection of artists who realize a Mars-oriented space program — NOW! — is more desirable than one languishing in LEO or returning to the moon. Not only will the most informed artists work on Mars-Only models — but, they will work together for a greater cause: the promotion of Mars exploration and settlement over the bureaucratic intertia of dream-crushing Lunar/LEO bullshit.
Eventually we will have our own website, blog, and online Mars-Only library, but, in the meantime checkout MarsSociety.org and send us a message if you are interested in hearing more or contributing: [email protected]
(By the way we call the above rover “Temerity None.” Tesla Experimental Motors Excursion Rover I___ T___ Yeti…or something like that.)