With the aid of a second designer, a product will be developed to present a concept model to encourage investment into the development of a Mars base. It will consist of a scaled-down model of a potential small, permanent Mars base. This document will include the development of the transportation, power, water, and fuel requirements of the base and will be presented alongside the other designer鈥檚 contribution. The concept model will be produced using Autodesk Inventor (2018), and will be presented as a three-dimensional prototype, printed using a Creality Ender 3, 3D printer. This project aims to create a concept model that can realistically demonstrate a potential Mars base that could be constructed with SpaceX鈥檚 (2021) involvement.
The production of the models began with the two Starship variants, the crewed Starship was produced first, and the cargo starship was produced using the crewed variant as a basis. This resulted in a similar overall design between the variants; assisting in printability as many of the bugs can be worked out before printing and not repeated. The next part developed involved the Launch and Landing Pads, which was developed by creating a circular base, tapering into a smaller circle at the top. The SpaceX (2021) logo was then traced onto the pad and cut out; this was done so that a different coloured insert could be embedded into the pad.
The nuclear reactors required significant research on size requirements for them to effectively power the colony. This had to be done as many nuclear reactors in operation have varied power outputs, and once the size was established, a curve was added to produce a softer aesthetic for the cooling towers.
The water mining facilities went through many iterations, with many of the changes being a result of research into the requirements of the system. The first iteration was a large stationary drill platform with pipes leading to storage tanks, this was changed in favour of a more manoeuvrable excavator, with the ability to move from deposit to deposit. This change was the result of research into how future colonies on Mars will expand as well as making it easier to move from deposit to deposit; later, this was scaled down to create several smaller excavators that can return to a depot and deliver the mined water-ice. This final design change was driven by the need for redundancy, as with most important subsystems in spacecraft redundancy is a common attribute to components, this redundancy can keep spacecraft operational well beyond their expected lifetime. This redundancy is vital to a Mars base, as if the excavators was taken offline for maintenance or due to a failure, the entire colony would be at risk even if there was water stored for emergencies. Having multiple excavators will ensure that demand can be met, and that the system can be easily expanded to meet the demand for a growing colony.
Finally, the fuel tanks and the propellant plant was produced, the plant was designed to closely represent how fuel could be created from compounds extracted from the atmosphere. Much of the propellant plant uses the Sabatier process (Junaedi, et al. 2011), similar to the atmosphere regenerators used on the International Space Station to convert exhaled carbon dioxide and water into oxygen for the crew to breathe (Junaedi, et al. 2011). It does this by heating the reactants and putting them under pressure (Vogt, et al. 2019). This process can be adapted too, rather than producing water, it can produce methane to be used as rocket fuel. The fuel tanks are based on the current tank farms being constructed by SpaceX (Ralph, 2021) to fuel the Starship and/or Super Heavy booster.
To demonstrate the layout of the base, all of the components were assembled within the Inventor software. This shows how the SpaceX (2021) constructed side of the base is expected to look when fully completed. This layout allows the landing pads to be kept away from the colony in case of failure and also reduces the plumbing needed for the propellant plants.
