How To Build A Martian Mega City

With more missions reaching the red planet, a human landing glints on the horizon. But what could the first permanent mars metropolis look like? Welcome to nüwa city

- Dr Stuart Clark

There can be no mistaking that interest in Mars is growing. Last month, three brand new spacecraft arrived at the Red Planet. The first was the UAE’s Emirates Mars Mission, also known as Hope, which entered orbit on 9 February to study the planet’s atmosphere. Just days later China’s Tianwen-1 settled in, and is now getting ready to deploy a lander that will carry a rover to the surface in May. The third visitor, NASA’s Perseverance rover, is carrying equipment to look for the chemical traces of past life.

However, it may just be the UAE’s mission that history remembers as the most significant. It is nothing less than the first step in the country’s stated ambition to establish an international human settlement on Mars by 2117.

And it’s not just the UAE that is thinking about living on Mars.

In February 2020, The Mars Society, an organisation dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet, launched an international competition to design a Martian city. Entries came from 175 teams from more than a dozen countries.

“Reading them, I was struck by the ingenuity displayed by the teams in coming up with extremely clever technical, economic and aesthetic solutions to the problems of designing a practical and beautiful Mars City state,” says Dr Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the Mars Society.

One of the teams that entered was the Sustainable Offworld Network (SONet), a community of professionals in the academic and private sectors dedicated to the development of sustainable human settlements on other worlds. Their entry: Nüwa city.

THE MARTIAN MINDSET