Spiral Mars Base by Madavlaw

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is my entry to the MakerBot Mars Base Challenge.
This is the Spiral Mars Base. It has a unique spiral shape for several different reasons. Ideally when utilizing a 3D printer to print a structure the printer would be big enough to print the whole structure in one print. Printing this way limits significantly the amount of assembly that would be required by the explorers, and even opens the possibility of having the base fully assembled when the explorers arrive. This idea is impractical; unfortunately the printer would be for too large for its own good. The middle ground, a solution to this problem, would be to have a large printer on wheels. A large printer capable of printing a 20 ft square base at a height of 12 ft would be used for this print. The printer would print a section of the Spiral Mars Base and then move on slightly and continue printing, slightly on top of the last piece, in order to form a solid continuous structure. The printer would have to be engineered and designed by a team of the super intelligent geniuses at MakerBot in conjunction with the slightly superer and slightly intelligenter geniuses at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. This mega genius team of undoubtedly good looking people would surely have no problem at all coming up with this Awesome Printer On wheels (APOW).

Utilizing the APOW, a base could be printed as long as you wanted it. You could have a base that could be a straight line and go on for a mile or two. But, if you are concerned about being energy sufficient and giving your base the most amount of insulation possible you would make it a spiral instead of a straight line. The spiral shape means that the building wraps around its self but, can still go on for as long as you want it. The living quarters of the Spiral Mars base would be on the inside of the spiral and so it would be insulated by two layers of the building along with two pockets of 20ft wide air space. The reason there is air space is because the spiral shape allows you the option of covering it and thus creating a separate space. One space inside the building and one space out.

The space that is created outside of the building would be used as a green house style enclosure. A place to grow food, conduct experiments, exercise and relax. The benefits of the explorers being able to seemingly go outside of the building and have grass in between their toes and the sun on their face would be immeasurable.

Besides being spiral shaped this Spiral Mars Base has one other unique property. The entirety of the base and the green house is covered by a container of water at least one foot thick. In my opinion the same super geniuses that brought us the APOW will have figured out how to produce water on Mars by the time we arrive there. So, having water on Mars will be no problem. Water will be abundant and readily available. Water is relatively see through and is also a good material for protecting the explorers from radiation. When the explorers look up from inside their spiral greenhouse area they will be looking up at Earth through a layer of radiation blocking water.