Underhill Mars Base

Underhill Mars Base:

In this model I took the approach of examining both the very large view of what overarching technologies and methods make the most sense to pursue on a permanent mars base, and the very small view of what the life and development at such a base might be like from a human perspective. The name “Underhill” is an homage to the first mars settlement in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy, a series of books that I would recomend to anyone, and from which I drew a lot of inspiration.

The tightest bottlenecks to a permanent base on Mars are the high cost of sending material from earth, and the very limited amounts of both freely available energy (solar cells only get 30%-50% of the sunlight available on earth) and key materials on the surface (no convenient lakes or thick atmosphere to pull water from, no mining/smelting infrastructure, etc..). Nuclear power will be the key to figuratively pouring this Mars base out of the proverbial bottle. Mars has a long his