Jonathan Morrison
Our life on Mars? High fashion and boutique hotels
We’ve watched the red planet for 4,000 years. Now, as plans are made for manned flights to Mars, a new show imagines what’s to come
For millennia before David Bowie demanded to know, in his cryptic 1971 anthem, whether there is life on Mars, the red planet had proved to be a source of wonder and intrigue. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Mayans, the Greeks and many others tracked its progress through the night sky with the naked eye, often ascribing it supernatural powers, before Galileo Galilei became the first to observe it through a telescope.
And with the earliest sketches made through a lens, Mars began to exert an even more intense pull on our imaginations, especially when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli identified on the surface “canali”, a word that was immediately mistranslated as “canals” instead of channels and spawned a thousand sci-fi nightmares of invasion by little green men or murder by HG Wells’s walking tripods. Even eminent scientists such as Lord Kelvin and Nikola Tesla claimed to have picked up radio signals emanating from the surface at the height of the Edwardian “Mars fever”.
Fast-forward a century and a quarter, and the chief executive of Tesla — the electric vehicle company, not the Serb inventor — is preparing for the first suborbital flight of his reusable rocket ship, ultimate destination: Mars. Elon Musk, who also founded SpaceX, the company developing the vertically landing craft, is confident that he can make “space travel like air travel”, as he said at the end of last month, and has previously stated that he would “like to die on Mars . . . just not on impact”. Nasa also plans to put a human on Mars, if not by Musk’s target date of 2024, then by the mid-2030s at least, and even the European Space Agency (ESA) is making envious noises. There’s just the question of a seven-to-nine-month journey to address.
So at least 52 years on from the last manned mission to the moon, in 1972, and a good 4,000 years since the planet’s existence was documented, there will be life on Mars, Mr Bowie — assuming there isn’t already, perhaps trapped in the ice below the surface or clustered round a volcanic hotspot. Which makes the Design Museum’s forthcoming exhibition Moving to Mars prescient as well as fascinating.
As Justin McGuirk, the chief curator of the Kensington museum, says: “Interest tends to come in waves, but there’s real momentum behind Mars exploration at the moment and it’s had a sustained media presence for five years now, in part due to Elon Musk saying so many extraordinary things.
“It’s not just science fiction any more — my sense is that it’s now doable, and that because humans are natural explorers, we’ll want to try it.”
The show is designed to break some pretty big barriers too. It’s almost certainly the first of its kind, addressing how the colonisation of our nearest habitable planet might be achieved in the next decade, and appropriately ambitious in scope. Beginning with some light history — sketches of the canali that caused so much trouble, a cuneiform Babylonian tablet and Athenian vase, photos from the first fly-by by Mariner 4 in 1965 — visitors will get to experience what it will be like to live there through all the senses, including smell. That’s right: the museum has commissioned a scent of Mars. What will that be like then, I ask. “Dusty,” McGuirk says.
A Hassell design for Mars living (HASSELL + ECKERSLEY O’CALLAGHAN)
Nasa, the ESA and even the British Museum have been generous with their loans, but not everything has worked out as planned — an attempt to get a real Draco thruster off SpaceX fell foul of international arms-control treaties — yet Trekkers, geeks and grown men with carefully concealed inner children are likely to be thrilled. There’s a 6m-high replica of an Ariane rocket and another full-size one of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover. There are spacesuits and zero-gravity dinner tables and futuristic types of algae-based food and models of space stations.
Yet while most are included to be gawped at in an ambling admiration of mankind’s ingenuity, there will be plenty to provoke the thoughts too, including video commentary by the British astronaut “Major Tim” Peake, who paid tribute to Bowie by tweeting his lyrics from the International Space Station, and an installation by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg that suggests Mars should be left for plants to colonise instead. That’s one part of the polemic at work here; the other is insisting that the exploration and colonisation of Mars is not just a scientific or engineering challenge, but fundamentally a design one. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
What makes the most convincing argument on this front is the architecture. Perhaps the most extraordinary exhibit of all is a full-scale Mars habitat pod designed by a London firm, Hassell, as part of a Nasa competition.The man responsible, Xavier de Kestelier, Hassell’s head of design technology and innovation, is a pioneer in the field of 3D printing and envisages an “ecosystem” of wheeled robots landing on the surface in advance and printing a hard shell from Martian regolith — the loose soil and rock on the surface — to protect the astronauts from heavy radiation and temperatures of -80C.
This “modular swarm” of autonomous intelligent robots would also be capable of joining together and reconfiguring themselves to perform a myriad of tasks, from simple transport and battery storage to scouting. Then, once the shell is complete, a circular chain of inflatable habitation and support pods would host science labs, workshops, virtual-reality platforms, dormitories and, yes, mankind. And that last element is perhaps the trickiest to cater for.
De Kestelier cites the example of Raymond Loewy, a French-American designer who was brought in to consult on the Skylab space station and who also features in the exhibition. “Nasa thought he would just pick the colour scheme,” he says. “Instead, he proved to them that the astronauts needed more than a hollow tube to live in, that they needed personal space and somewhere to sit down together for dinner, even if they had to squeeze it into their mouths. Above all, he told them to put a window in it — much to the engineers’ horror.”
Robot life on Mars (HASSELL + ECKERSLEY O’CALLAGHAN)
For his part, De Kestelier wants the Mars voyagers to grow bamboo in nutrient-rich water so that they can make wooden floors as well as other items, and to print in 3D stylish furniture from surplus packaging. His pods will also cluster around a courtyard — one of the most enduring and pleasing architectural tropes — and offer views across to one another and over the extraordinary Martian landscape. In short, it’s more boutique hotel than prison.
“I wanted to create something that if placed in the Atacama Desert would look like a cool place to stay,” he says. “What we’ve done is realistic and because we’re not just coming in at the end to do a pretty picture, as designers have in the past, we’ve made sure we haven’t forgotten the human. I think people will be surprised that it’s homey and not that spacey. Hopefully, we’ve been able to give it an overall shape and vision while being clever.”
Yet while the design may push the limits of what’s possible in terms of spacefaring construction, it has implications for life on Earth too. On a trip to Mars nothing will be wasted. Clothes will be fashioned from parachutes (the fashionistas Raeburn will be showing off some concepts) and all waste recycled in an advanced, yet sometimes necessarily primitive, “closed-loop” existence.
“Space exploration has always stimulated innovation,” McGuirk says. “What we learn from surviving on a planet of extreme scarcity may just help us solve our environmental problems on Earth. It’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?”
And it is. So even should our colonisation of Mars fail — and there are clearly many obstacles to be overcome — that aspect alone would ensure that this far-reaching exhibition is remembered as more than just a space oddity.
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