Mars Base

Hello, my name is Miles, I'm 14 and I like STEM. This is also my first time making an Instructable. (=

I designed a house that can support human life on Mars. This house is designed to be self sufficient, withstand the harsh conditions of Mars (extreme temperatures and dust storms) and be a great environment for people to live and grow in. I chose Mars because soon humanity is going to run out of land on earth and probably cause many more problems for the world in the future so it is a good idea to have a backup plan to keep humanity from dying out. It would also be awesome to live on an entirely new planet that no one has ever been on! A few pieces of the base would have to be transported to Mars at a time and then reassembled on the planet. Once the base was constructed it would take awhile for it to become self sufficient because it would take awhile to find water and for the plants to grow. Once it was self sufficient, water and resources could be mined from the mine and eventually people could start building more parts of the base only from what they produced from the base. As the base grows it could become a huge network of buildings (because there is plenty of space on Mars) and it could support hundreds of people. A base on Mars would also allow people to study the planet, the nearby stars and give us a better understanding of our universe. This Instructable will give instructions on how a Mars Base could be constructed.

• Tinkercad: https://www.tinkercad.com

Materials needed for Mars Base:

• Steel
• 4 Glass domes
• 7 Solar panels
• 2 Small windmills
• LED bulbs
• Crops
• Nutrient rich soil
• Grow light bulb
• Water
• Fish

At first when I saw this challenge I knew I wanted to make something on Mars because space is so cool! So I drew some initial thoughts down on paper. It was similar to what I have now, but more compact. When I designed it in Tinkercad I realized that I wanted to add more to it and I wanted it to have more space, so I redesigned it.

I decided it would be best to uses huge screws that go into the ground to stabilize the base to the surface of the planet. I wanted to make it have multiple different rooms so I designed the main room in the center and then made three rooms around it. The frame will be made out of steel and the domes will be made of thick glass to let as much light in as possible for the plants and to keep heat inside. The exits of the base are air locks that have two doors so that when people need to go outside they can open the first door, walk in the middle, close the first door, open the second door and walk outside and vise-versa. That way only a little bit of oxygenated air and heat is lost rather than all of it.

When you are that far away from sources of plants, water, and oxygen it is impossible to survive and it would take too many resources to have them transported all the way from Earth every time they got low. The first problem I ran into when designing the Mars Base was self sustainability. The solution was just to make a tiny version of Earth. So I made a miniature ecosystem. The fish in the water feed on the plants above them. There are pumps that pump water with fish waste up to the plants. The plants use the the water, nutrients from the fish waste, and the sunlight and light from a grow light bulb to grow. The plants take the carbon dioxide that the people and fish produce and make it into oxygen that the people and the fish can breathe. The plants also produce fruits and vegies (if you plant the right seeds, of course) that us humans like to eat. When there isn't enough fruits and vegies then people can eat a few of the fish. Human urine is filtered (a lot) until it is safe to drink and the other waste is buried under ground or it could be used to help grow the plants.

The mines are used to gather resources needed to expand and collect data about the planet. Iron is much more common on Mars than on Earth (that's what gives it it's color and why it's called the "Red Planet") and it could be used to make more steel to help expand the Mars Base. If the Mars Base is located near the northern plains, people could find ice water on the surface or a little bit under the surface easily. Otherwise it would probably be hard to find ice. The ice would then have to be melted and filtered before it could be used. And who knows, maybe we'll find signs of alien life!

The next room is mainly the storage room where (obviously) things are stored. Stuff like food, water, medicines, clothes, materials, tools, batteries, electronics, and even toys are all stored in that room. The storage room could also be used for other purposes such as a kitchen, workshop, garage, or lab.

The center room is the living room/bedroom complete with a nice couch, bed, table, heater and some room to work out or for kids to play.

There is one very important thing we're missing: power! Without electricity the humans living inside wouldn't be able to see very well and they would freeze to death. A nuclear reactor would be the most efficient source of heat and electricity, but because there would have to be many shipments of uranium from Earth to Mars it would also use a lot of fuel. Nuclear power should be used if more efficient ways of transporting uranium were used, but my goal was to make the base completely self sustainable in case humans have to evacuate Earth someday. So I added solar panels instead to produce electricity, but sadly Mars is so far away from the sun that solar panels would only produce about half the amount they would produce compared to Earth. Temperatures on Mars range from 70 degrees F to -225 degrees F. I did some research and found that a space heater uses about 1.5kwh every hour, but a solar panel only produces about 1.5kwh every day. So depending on the efficiency of the insulation and the location and size of the base, the amount of electricity needed to heat it would vary. I also found that an LED bulb uses .01kwh every hour so the amount of electricity would vary depending on how many lights the people use and how long they use them. I would also have to add a few extra solar panels for powering the Cyber Rover, an electric stove and for backup supply. So in reality it would need a lot more than 7 solar panels. There is also another complication though: Mars has dust storms. Dust storms on Mars can last up to 6 months and the dust would block the sunlight from reaching the solar panels and damage the panels making them much less efficient. I did more research and found that wind turbines are more efficient than solar panels. So I added two small windmills as another source of energy to use the harsh conditions of Mars to make it so that the people still have energy even in a storm.

The people living on Mars would use the Cyber Rover for exploration. The Cyber Rover is an electric rover that is designed for the rough terrain on Mars. As people explore they could collect more data and look for more suitable places to live (and maybe find aliens!). During dust storms the Cyber Rover would be stored in the storage room. Once the Mars Base gets big enough, it could also be used as transportation.

I had a lot of fun designing and thinking about this project. I also learned that we use a ton of electricity in our everyday lives and sometimes we waste a lot of it too. So I'm going to try to be better at turning things off and unplugging things that I'm not using at the moment and reminding others to do the same. Although it would be small, maybe after a while we will make a difference in our communities. I think that Mars Bases are in the near future and you might just be the first person to step on Mars! Thank you for reading about my project and hopefully in the future building my design.