1 — Mission brief
Build a growth plan that closes mass, power, maintenance, logistics, human and safety budgets.
This capstone mission requires several modules at once. An answer is complete only when it closes physical budgets, describes sensors and actions, retains margin, handles a credible failure and explains what the crew must do. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
2 — System map
Start by drawing mass, energy, information and authority flows. An arrow without a unit or owner is incomplete. The map is then used to identify common dependencies and interfaces that can propagate failure. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
A 500-sol settlement is managed as a portfolio of capabilities rather than a list of construction projects. Power, water, pressurized volume, maintenance, mobility and spares must grow in a compatible order. Adding a habitat without expanding selected utilities can reduce overall resilience. The student therefore builds a campaign-by-campaign capability map and identifies resources that become bottlenecks as population or production grows.
3 — Data and assumptions
The supplied numbers are training-scenario data. Copy them with units, add missing assumptions and separately mark values that come from NASA sources. Any value that changes the verdict requires sensitivity analysis. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
Growth assumptions are tested across several horizons. Processing 70,000 kg over 500 sols does not prove the industrial chain can run continuously. The student introduces maintenance, planned outages, failures and demand variation, distinguishing nominal, sustainable and emergency capacity. A production target requiring 100% hardware utilization leaves no room to recover from anomalies.
4 — Governing relationship
The equation is only an entry point. It must be connected to a budget, an available measurement and a decision threshold. If units do not reduce correctly, stop before using a calculator. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
5 — Starting calculations
Puissance
60 kW + 35 kW - 12 kW indisponibles = 83 kWEau
140 kg/j × 500 sols = 70 000 kg processedMaintenance
9 h/sem × 71 sem ≈ 639 h6 — Mass, power and time budget
Build three separate tables. The mass budget distinguishes structure, consumables, spares and margin. The energy budget separates instantaneous power from accumulated energy. The time budget includes operations, maintenance, rest and communications delay. Positive margin in one table does not automatically compensate for a deficit in another. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
The 83 kW network after an asset loss must be compared with actual prioritized loads. The student defines service levels: survival, minimum operations, normal production and expansion. A new expansion begins only when the base can return to the previous level after a single failure. This prevents growth from gradually consuming every margin until the first major incident.
7 — Navigation, communications and state knowledge
State which variables must be known locally, which can be reconstructed later by Earth, and what accuracy each decision requires. Radio delay means safing and initial diagnosis must be possible without waiting for Earth. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
Long-term state knowledge uses reliability trends. Failure counts, repair time, spare consumption, performance drift and recurring anomalies influence the next campaign. The student therefore does not rely on one global availability number; subsystems that consume disproportionate crew hours or create common dependencies across modules are identified explicitly.
8 — Survival and human factors
Check air, water, thermal control, radiation, food, medicine and workload where relevant to this mission. The goal is to avoid a false “all good” technical calculation that forgets sleep time, suit donning or the need for a second crewmember during a critical operation. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
Human organization changes with settlement size. More hardware means more procedures, responsibilities and configuration decisions. The growth plan includes cross-training, handovers, maintenance time and change authority. A larger base understood by only one expert per system can be less resilient than a smaller base with distributed competence.
9 — Mission-specific injected incident
On sol 320, two major assets become unavailable while habitat expansion is underway; the growth plan must be rebaselined without eroding survival reserves or maintenance capacity. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
For AM-16.12, the answer must show which quantities in “Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures” are recomputed, which assumptions cease to be valid and which action remains reversible before consuming an irreversible reserve.
On sol 320 two major assets become unavailable during an expansion. The student freezes nonessential changes, reconstructs actual remaining capability and decides whether to finish, safe or temporarily abandon the work. Already spent resources do not justify continuing through sunk-cost bias. The decision compares the risk of leaving the extension incomplete with the risk of consuming the existing base's final margins.
10 — Decision and justification
End with an explicit decision: continue, delay, reconfigure, abandon an activity or enter refuge mode. Cite the three quantities controlling that decision and the remaining margin. A conclusion without a numerical or operational criterion is an opinion, not an engineering decision. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».
The final dossier shows the base at sols 0, 100, 250 and 500 using the same indicators: firm power, water, refuge volume, critical inventory, maintenance capacity, mobility and open anomalies. A decision register records architecture changes. The capstone goal is to show that a robust settlement is not merely larger; it preserves margin, competence and recovery paths as it grows.
11 — Required deliverables
- flow and interface diagram;
- mass-power-time budget with margins;
- nominal and post-incident timelines;
- assumption and source register;
- argued final decision.
12 — Assessment rubric
40%: calculation and unit consistency; 20%: interface treatment; 15%: margins and degraded mode; 15%: human factors and procedure; 10%: source quality and separation of data, assumptions and scenarios. For this mission, the criterion is applied explicitly to « Final mission: grow the settlement for 500 sols despite failures ».