Team: Rustem Baishev

One day Mars will become as an ordinary destination as our own Earth’s continents and cities. In such case expandability is the main consideration, for which the most suitable technology should be invented to dictate the design. Given the distance to Mars and roughness of its terrain, the translation of a 3d model from virtual into physical space is a task of an extreme complexity for any positioning and printing method. Therefore, those methods should be as analog as possible.

The nuclear powered (cold fusion mini reactor) crawling extruder, once deployed, is “tethered” by laser beam to the anchor point in a sensor head of the “Shepherd Bot”, which is locked on its spot. Once copied its position, the machine starts to crawl and excavate the soil from beneath of itself, grinds and mixes it with a bonding agent and slowly extrudes into pre-determined, constant domed profile of the structure, which is optimized for radiation protection, direct sunlight blockage, as well as becomes a natural solution for thermal balance of the sealed habitable space below. In the special chamber, the extrusion is then bombarded by high pressure high temperature CO2 flue that glassifies surface layers for stiffness. With this the machine crawls and builds the submerged structure behind; then Shepherd Bot commands it to turn, and trajectory forms a spiral - a geometric definition of an infinite growth. The colony is kept contained with no need to build infrastructures from scratch as oppose to a scattered settlement. For an increasing demands of interplanetary specie, the technology is kept being developed until the first settlement in a size of a city is built on Mars.

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