Category Archives: Settlements

Bryan Versteeg: Spacehabs.com

Bryan Versteeg has worked for over 20 years in the graphics industry and specifically the last 15
years working as a conceptual artist in the architectural and engineering field.


He has run his own studio for the last 6 years and in 2011 started Spacehabs.com to focus on
conceptual visualizations for space exploration. Bryan is responsible for all the beautiful
animations and illustrations on the Mars One website.

CupCake! MakerBot Industries Cute Open Source 3D Printer

The Mars Foundation and Thingiverse team up with MakerBot’s off-the-shelf open source 3D printer to design and prototype models for use in Martian settlement. A library of open source designs is archived at Thingiverse online for anyone to “print” using a MakerBot.  Everything from screwdrivers to saxophones will come out of a little Martian machine like CupCake.  Practice now, submit your work, and help build a design archive which will be called upon for ages.  : )
MakerBot Industries – Robots That Make Things
MakerBot overview featured on Google Tech Talks YouTube Channel
MakerBot YouTube Channel
Thingiverse

Mars Foundation "To Arrive, Survive, & Thrive!"

The mission of the Mars Homestead Project is to design, fund, build and operate the first 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. The Mars Foundation has also established a small board of technical advisors  who provide expertise in specific areas, and created a general “brainstorming” discussion group which is open to the interested public, regardless of their technical experience.

Mars Foundation “To Arrive, Survive, & Thrive!”
http://www.marshome.org/

Mars Foundation Artist’s Concepts Gallery
http://www.marshome.org/images2/

James Cameron: The Last Hope for Hollywood

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James Cameron personally attended the International Mars Society Conference in 1999. He delivered the Keynote Address then spent the entire weekend moving from panel to panel with his camera crew, sitting in the audience alongside other attendees while taking extensive notes on a yellow legal pad with a ball point pen. That was before laptops and only a year and a half after the release of his record blockbuster “Titanic.” It was a bold dramatic meaningful appearance which said: I care about Humans-to-Mars; I want to get this right. For the next two years he continued to send teams of videographers to record every presentation. Then, two purely idiotic movies were released — “Red Planet,” “Mission to Mars” — and Cameron wisely decided to shelve his project until the cultural debris settled. Periodically interviewers will ask, “What about Mars?” The most important consistent reply he provides with confidence is: “I have done the research. I know Mars. When the time is right it will happen.”
James Cameron has not only laid the foundation for making one of the most important films about Mars in our generation, for a time he even sat on NASA’s Advisory Council – a panel of experts and advisers appointed by the agency’s administrator. He remains on the science team for the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory. The Mars Science Laboratory, known as Curiosity, is a NASA rover scheduled to be launched between October and December of 2011. One can only hope this window of opportunity is not corrupted by competition from less informed directors, once again.
“I’ve been very interested in the Humans to Mars movement—the ‘Mars Underground’—and I’ve done a tremendous amount of personal research for a novel, a miniseries, and a 3-D film.”
These very rough drafts of Mars mission equipment were created by Digital Domain nearly ten years ago to accompany Cameron’s Keynote Address. Although they were of high-quality for CG at that time, he nevertheless apologized for not being able to bring final renders. The point of showing these images though was to demonstrate his support for Mars Direct and in particular humans to Mars; Cameron wanted to show fellow space enthusiasts he could be relied upon to “get the facts right” and — that this is important. (As an aside, during his keynote the name for Factual Fiction was conceived: if we could get the facts right a “New Mars” in the public’s imagination might lead to a rethinking of humans to Mars.)
“Exploration is not a luxury we can’t afford; it’s a necessity we can’t afford to lose. Pushing farther into the unknown is our greatest endeavor as a civilization and our deepest responsibility to future generations.” Near-term, realistic — without aliens, laser, or guns — someday James Cameron will change the way we think about Mars. No doubt there are many right now saying, “Come on Cameron!”

The follow are excerpts from his Mars Society keynote address:
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“People are always saying … we need to solve our problems right here on Earth before we go spending money out in space. It makes me want to vomit frankly. [applause!].

Check back in five hundred or a thousand years. People will still be talking about all the problems that need to be solved. We are never going to reach some utopian plateau where everything is solved so we can then, with lordly confidence, look around us for worlds to conquer as some kind of hobby. Not spreading ourselves outward into the solar system now, when we have the capability to do so, is one of the problems we have to be solving right here on Earth. [more applause].

We are really at a turning point. Go forward, or go back. By stopping, by stagnating, we go back. I look around at the turn of the millennium and see a prosperous, powerful, technologically unparalleled society which, collectively, has no purpose but to feather its own nest. It is a goal-less, rudderless society, dedicated to increasing security and creature comforts. .

Our children are raised in a world without heroes. [!!!!!!!!!!]

They are led to believe that heroism consists of throwing a football the furthest, getting the most hangtime during a slam dunk, or selling the most movie tickets with your looks and boyish charm. This is not heroism, and these are not valid tests of our mettle as an intelligent race.
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Young kids need something to dream about, something to measure their value system against. They live in a sea of mind-numbing inputs, a point-and-shoot videogame world where it is hip to not care, where death and violence have no meaning, where leaders are morally bankrupt, and where the scientific quest for understanding is sooo not cool. Going to Mars is not a luxury we can’t afford … it is a necessity we can’t afford to be without.”

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.