Capstone project: design a 30-person Mars settlement
Integrate propulsion, power, habitat, water, food, mobility, maintenance, medicine and operations into one quantified and defensible architecture. This capstone project deliberately combines multiple disciplines in one architecture so tradeoffs cannot be hidden.
Mastery objectives
- identify the system boundaries, interfaces and degraded cases specific to the subject
- reproduce the numerical examples and check units, assumptions and margins
- turn a concept into a verifiable design, procedure or decision
- connect the subsystem to human, power, logistics and maintenance constraints
1. A capstone is not a summary
This project forces decisions to agree with each other. An excellent power solution may be incompatible with logistics mass; an ambitious crop area may create unfunded electrical and thermal loads; a lightweight architecture may lack redundancy. The goal is interface management and trade studies. Every important assumption is stated, every major number is traceable and every margin has a reason.
2. Define mission, crew and time horizon
Start with scenario: 30 people, nominal stay, resupply windows, return capability, growth phase and target autonomy. Without that definition, stocks, habitat and industry cannot be sized. Separate what must operate before crew arrival from what can be assembled by crew and what belongs to later expansion.
3. Mass budget and predeployment
Hardware does not arrive in one shipment. Build a manifest for habitat, power, ECLSS, consumables, rovers, workshop, spares and reserves. Critical elements are predeployed and tested when possible. A plan that requires one cargo vehicle to arrive successfully just days before crew has excessive logistics risk.
4. Energy and power budget
Separate daily energy from instantaneous power. ECLSS, computing and safety are continuous loads; workshop, ISRU and some food operations can be scheduled. Peaks must fit generation and storage. Define a degraded mode in which only vital loads remain powered.
5. Water, atmosphere and food
Life-support loops use realistic recovery and loss rates. Water combines recovery, storage and make-up source. Oxygen combines stores and production. Food combines imported reserves and local crops. Every loop has a survival time if production stops so that a headline “98% recycling” cannot hide an undersized reserve.
6. Habitat, fire and refuge
Show compartments, airlocks, refuge, evacuation routes, noisy zones, laboratory, workshop and storage. Fire and pressure barriers must not sever both routes to refuge. Cable, fluid and ventilation interfaces are identified because they can propagate failures across compartments.
7. Mobility, science and outside work
The settlement has a fleet with rescue capability. Routes to ISRU, science and landing sites are documented. EVA radius respects rescue and environmental constraints. Science operations preserve context and chain of custody without blocking daily maintenance.
8. Maintenance, spares and local industry
Create a critical-equipment list, redundancy strategy and spares policy. The workshop can make simple parts and refurbish components but does not instantly reproduce Earth's whole industrial base. A make/repair/stock/import matrix exposes true dependencies.
Deepening: success and abort criteria
A complete architecture defines when the mission can continue, when objectives must be reduced and when return or evacuation becomes necessary. Criteria are tied to measured resources such as days of water, power capability, ECLSS state, medical status, fleet and communications. Writing them before a crisis reduces improvisation and reveals where additional redundancy is worth its mass.
Deepening: coherent margins across subsystems
Adding 20% margin everywhere can make an architecture unnecessarily heavy, while inconsistent margins can hide the true weak point. Margins follow uncertainty and criticality: immature hardware mass, vital reserves, variable loads or ISRU performance. A system review checks that assumptions used by one subsystem match assumptions used by the others.
Deepening: Earth-dependency matrix
The final design distinguishes locally autonomous functions from those still dependent on Earth. For every critical function, list parts, software, consumables, skills and materials that cannot yet be replaced locally. This prevents calling a settlement autonomous because it produces oxygen while one catalyst, sensor or drug has no replacement path. The matrix ranks dependencies and identifies which reduction gives the largest resilience gain.
9. Worked example: water reserve under degraded mode
Thirty people at 3.5 L/day potable and food water require 105 L/day. At 97% recovery, theoretical loss is 3.15 L/day, so 1,000 L could cover over 300 days of that nominal loss. If recovery falls to zero, the same stock lasts only 1,000 ÷ 105 ≈ 9.5 days. Emergency sizing must use the outage case, not only nominal efficiency.
10. Integrated exercise
Design a 30-person architecture with 500 kW average power, 3 MWh storage, two pressurized habitats, crop area, workshop and three rovers. Define priority loads, 30-day reserves, redundant functions and actions if 40% of power generation is lost for ten sols.
11. Reasoned solution
Protect ECLSS, thermal control, communications, medical capability and safety first. Industrial loads and some artificially lit agriculture can be reduced or shifted. Storage should bridge peaks rather than be exhausted in the first sol. State the criteria for returning to normal and the effect of degraded operation on reserves.
12. Final design package
Deliver functional architecture, mass budget, energy/power budget, water, atmosphere, food, thermal system, maintenance, fleet, risks, emergency procedures, sources and assumptions. A critical review should identify the five largest remaining Earth dependencies and the three changes offering the best resilience gain per kilogram imported.