Mars has been the focus of several missions by different space agencies throughout the years. Now that Mars was reported to be habitable, an idea to create human colonies, mainly by astronauts, there arises.
According to an article in Space, the chances of having communities habitable by humans in Mars is attainable. However, the large challenge is that it would cost not just millions, but billions of dollars to put up colonies out there. This is because a large amount of this would go to creating different advanced technologies that would support the life system there. More than that, this first set of people must be well-educated and must be one of the smartest astronauts and engineers in the world.
In the recently concluded "New Space Age Conference" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, Phil Metzger, the co-founder of the NASA Kennedy Space Center's Swamp Works, shared that the skills of the astronauts who'll be sent to Mars is a crucial element as Mars is simply not like our planet. Metzger also emphasized that aside from knowing the background knowledge of Mars as a planet, these future Mars occupants should also carry the basic know-hows of how to utilize the available resources in Mars into something useful.
Metzger and the speakers from the MIT conference all agreed that the Mars astronauts colony should be able to live a sustainable life there since resupplying missions can't always be relied on as it will take millions of money and it will also take the time to deliver supplies from Earth to Mars. Keegan Kirkpatrick, founder and team lead of RedWorks, also added that if Earth citizens want to push through with this Mars colony, there should be independence between Mars and Earth.
With this, Kirkpatrick proposes for researchers to start studying the sustainable materials that can thrive on Mars. His colleagues at RedWorks are already initiating some efforts and their team is currently looking at several materials from the past which will be mixed with modern technologies to make them stronger and be easily used by astronauts.
On the subject of where could the Mars colony get its water source, Jeffrey Hoffman, a former astronaut and the director of MIT's Man Vehicle laboratory, also shared that it can actually be easily sourced out our extracted from Mars. This area is still up for further research under the NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission which will also make use of the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resources Utilization Experiment or MOXIE.
Several types of research are now focusing on how to make Mars truly livable. One study as posted on Mashable involves having a magnetic field around Mars to avoid the impacts of solar winds.
Metzger and his colleagues continuously stressed that the Mars colony must be well-informed and at the same time, critical thinkers in order to easily adapt to the foreign environment out there. The speakers even joked during the conference that a lot of astronauts version of MacGyvers, a TV character known for his problem-solving skills, is needed in Mars.
