More than 165 submissions to the competition were received by NASA. The 3D Printed Habitat Challenge is ultimately aimed at contributing towards the development of new technologies for additive manufacturing using "local indigenous materials" in space and on Earth.
"The creativity and depth of the designs we’ve seen have impressed us," says NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program Manager Monsi Roman. "These teams were not only imaginative and artistic with their entries, but they also really took into account the life-dependent functionality our future space explorers will need in an off-Earth habitat."
Ice House was designed by Team Space Exploration Architecture, and Clouds Architecture Office. It is based on NASA’s "follow the water" approach to exploration. As water is a means of sustaining life and ice a potential building material, the team opted to locate at Alba Mons in Mars’ northern hemisphere, where it is believed sub-surface water ice is plentiful.
The proposal uses a lander as the basis of the shelter, containing both private and communal interior spaces. Once in situ, it would deploy an inflatable ETFE membrane to create an interstitial environment between the outside of the capsule and the Mars atmosphere. Rovers would then extract water from the ice below the surface at Alba Mons and apply it to form a protective skin on the inside of the inflatable environment.
Not only does the layer of ice provide protection from radiation in the outside atmosphere, it is also translucent and allows light into the habitat. By conditioning the environment within the inflatable section, it is proposed that the ice be kept frozen indefinitely and vegetation could be grown, which would help to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.
The second place award of $15,000 went to Team Gamma, from architecture firm Foster + Partners. Its concept proposes using semi-autonomous robots to build a shelter using regolith (the loose soil and rocks found on the surface of Mars).