A Challenge of Massive Proportions: Designing for Life on Mars
Space Oasis Delft is a student team working on designing extraterrestrial habitats to support and nurture human life by participating in the Jacques Rougerie Foundation challenge. This year, the team is taking on the challenge of designing a village on Mars with a focus on adaptability, circularity, and human-centered design. For this article, we have the opportunity to discuss the project with Emma van der Laarse and Deirdre van Roijen, the team leader and project manager of this year’s team.
From Moon to Mars: Learning from the SOD 1 Project
Mars is an incredibly inhospitable place to build and support human habitation; the team faces challenges such as enormous temperature fluctuations, dust storms, marsquakes, and radiation. The team approaches these obstacles by designing modular puzzle-like components that can be adapted to these conditions. An example they gave me was that they had devised a way to collect resources from dust storms, but they didn’t want to reveal exactly how before the design was unveiled. They are also exploring how to use available resources on Mars to combat these conditions, for example by using pykrete, a material made from Martian ice and cellulose waste, to create radiation shields.
The team’s previous project, SOD 1, focused on a lunar base. While both the Moon and Mars are extreme environments to varying degrees, Mars brings a different set of available resources. Although direct application of lunar designs is not possible, the team applies overarching strategies from their Moon project, such as designing with nature in mind and working interdisciplinarily, to their Mars village.
Smart Teams, Tight Planning: Project Management by Students
The team is structured into smaller teams focusing on different aspects of the habitat, such as the engineering team or the architecture team. Their 19 members are divided between full-time and part-time, with all management roles being full-time to ensure oversight, while most others are in part-time positions. This structure is common in student teams but brings inevitable challenges, with part-timers having to balance academic responsibilities and team responsibilities. It can be difficult for highly motivated part-timers to feel they can’t contribute as much as they’d like due to their limited time.
The team deals with these differences by ensuring flexibility in scheduling and making sure critical meetings are held at suitable times. They also ensure that part-time members understand that they are valued and necessary for the team’s operation. Finally, by clearly documenting and structuring communication, part-timers can stay informed regardless of their availability.
They’ve found that one of the biggest challenges is that many of their members don’t have practical experience when starting. The transition from studying to a large team project can be intimidating and can lead to situations where members dream too big. However, like a startup, the team needs to have grand ideas that capture attention but remain feasible. They therefore need to ensure members are highly motivated, but not overly motivated, so they don’t waste time on less important tasks.
One way they handle this is by breaking down their one-year project cycle into five phases: Conceptual Design, Preliminary Design, Integration, Documentation, and Finalization. The team is currently in the Preliminary Design phase, where their individual ideas are being brought together into tangible and feasible designs. The management works with members of last year’s team to identify the most challenging deadlines and communicates these to the team leaders to understand what steps are needed to meet them.
Five Goals, one Vision: from Biomimicry to Self-Sufficiency
The team has also set five additional goals to challenge themselves further, namely: Biomimicry, Human-Centered, Self-Sufficiency, Gradual Expansion, and In Situ Resource Utilization. These goals inspire the team to achieve more and apply their technical skills in the aesthetically-oriented competition. These goals also help bring together the more technical students and the more architecture/aesthetics-focused students to devise solutions by leveraging each other’s strengths/expertise. The multidisciplinary aspect of the team is something that both Emma and Deirdre believe to be the team’s most valuable asset.
Learning, Documenting, and Passing on: Lessons for the Future
An important lesson they have both learned is the importance and challenge of documentation, especially when it comes to preparing their work so that next year’s team can learn from it. Ensuring that all members document their work in a standard way meant creating a guideline document and a document overview. Through this, they have also learned that it is sometimes important to step back from their work to reset their perspective and come back better to guide the project.
What We Take away: Collaboration, Vision, and Innovation Power
Space Oasis Delft demonstrates how student teams are able to realize fantastic projects through interdisciplinary collaboration and good management efforts. Moreover, student teams are environments where member availability varies greatly from person to person and over time, creating unique challenges for project management. New solutions are also needed to learn how to manage a team of students in just one year, while ensuring that someone else can learn from your experience and take over. Therefore, both Emma and Deirdre strongly recommend joining a student team to every student.