Mars City Design is an innovation and design platform founded by architect and filmmaker Vera Mulyani. Every year since its inception, the organization hosts the Mars City Design Challenges, where students from around the world come together with industry experts to produce architectural designs for living on Mars.
The focus of the 2020 challenges was Urban Farming. For this competition, participants were tasked with creating architectural innovations and ideas that would ensure food security on Mars. But in keeping with the focus of Mars City Design, participants needed to look beyond the basics and come up with innovative ideas that would allow future Martians to thrive.
Winning designs
As with previous challenges, this year’s winning submissions (ten in total) were broken down into multiple categories. These included Mars Agriculture Engineering, for which four winning submissions were selected. These included Justin’s Mars Farm, a concept submitted by Justin Pourkaveh – a thermal systems fluid engineer in commercial aerospace.
Pourkaveh’s concept is essentially a food production system made up of interconnected modules. Each module provides 290 m2 of growing space, providing a total of 1,450 m2 of arable land with which to grow food. Each module is windowed and designed to regulate solar input, thermal conditions, humidity, and other crucial factors.
The concept leverages advances made indoor farming (or urban farming), a practice that is becoming increasingly common here on Earth and has been traditionally used to grow food in inhospitable climes. Adapted for living on Mars, this system allows each Farm unit to grow enough food to feed nine people. According to Pourkavah, this will be the size of an initial crew that lands on Mars.
Read more at Universe Today (M. Williams)