MARS COLONIES: Plans for Settling the Red Planet

by Frank Crossman (editor)

In October 2018, The Mars Society announced that it was holding a special contest
called, "The Mars Colony Prize" for designing the best plan for a Mars colony
of 1000 people. There would be a prize of $10,000 for first place, $5,000 for
second and $2500 for third. In addition, the best 20 papers would be published in a
book - "Mars Plans for Settling the Red Planet."

This is that book. The 580 page greyscale softcover edition and the color ebook
edition are now on sale at Amazon, other online sites, and can also be ordered
through your local book stores.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Science

715 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 2, 2019

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

This is good stuff for Elon Musk's dreams. To avoid nightmares.

https://www.marssociety.org/news/2020...

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is hopeful and makes me slightly more optimistic for the future, but its definitely geared for a very narrow audience and not exactly easy reading for the lay reader.

[Sjoerd van Heijst · Rating 3 out of 5]

First ideas are nicely worked out, later ones not so much.

[Dan Carey]

Honestly, I didn't even try to read this because my interest has waned.

[Johnathan Barazzuol · Rating 3 out of 5]

About half or more of these plans are pretty weak sauce. Several however are brilliant. Cool book given the era we live in though.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very useful and important text, as well as being an interesting read. Anyone involved in defining the architecture of an actual Martian (or Lunar) base really should take the time to go through it. The 22 papers are diverse in their approaches, philosophies, degree of technical depth… which is part of what makes this anthology so interesting. Seeing the originality of some of these approaches tended to fire the imagination and enthusiasm of the reader. These teams covered everything: site selection; resource harvesting; construction methods; power generation; life support; farming & food; culture; medicine; economics; politics… It’s all here, addressed in different ways and with original approaches by the various teams. It will be fascinating to see how any of these approaches hold up as this reality starts to unfold over the next decade (or two).

One lesson learned here is that papers written for a particular audience really should be written or edited by a native speaker of the language of that audience. In a few cases, the slightly-less-than-perfect English in the text made those papers a little harder and less enjoyable to read. All in all though, the creativity and quality of thought was evident throughout.