Table Of ContentJustin B. Hollander
First
The
City Mars
on
An Urban Planner’s
Guide to Settling
the Red Planet
Springer Praxis Books
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Justin B. Hollander
The First City on Mars:
An Urban Planner’s
Guide to Settling the
Red Planet
Justin B. Hollander
Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning
Tufts University
Medford, MA, USA
Springer Praxis Books
ISSN 2731-5401 ISSN 2731-541X (electronic)
Space Exploration
ISBN 978-3-031-07527-8 ISBN 978-3-031-07528-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07528-5
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Klaus Peter Hollander (1908–1990).
Foreword
There will be towns and then cities on Earth’s Moon and on Mars sooner than
you might think. That is inevitable, just like the first settlers on the East Coast
of America were destined to move across the entire continent.
It is in our human nature to explore and then pioneer. This leads to trans-
portation systems that enable the establishment of forts and trading posts,
then towns, then cities. It’s what humans do.
The sooner professionals in a wide range of disciplines focus on the long-
term thinking, research, planning and design of cities off-world, the better.
The better to make them humane, sustainable, beautiful places where people
can be proud and love living there.
These places will then launch bold new adventures, moving further out
into our Solar System and then beyond.
This book is perfectly timed and in great need as a highly researched and
reasoned foundation by a world-class professional urban planner. It will move
the concept of settling Mars forward.
Why and Why Now?
The two richest men in the world, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both started
rocket companies and have plans to establish the means and infrastructure for
humankind to move out into the Solar System and do it over the next few
decades.
And they are not alone. There are several other billionaires, mega-
corporations and a growing number of countries starting their own space
programs and encouraging private space enterprise.
vii
viii Foreword
Financial industry analysts are forecasting the overall worldwide space
industry to pass the $1.1 trillion level by 2040. That’s only 17 years from now!
Musk started SpaceX for a specific reason: to build a city on Mars for a mil-
lion people.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk has claimed he's confident there will be a city of 1 million
on Mars by 2050, transported there by 1000 Starships proposed by his SpaceX ven-
ture, with plans for up to three rocket launches per day.
Mirage News, Mar 19, 2021
People betting against Elon Musk lose. People betting against pioneers with
the deep attitude that failure is not an option lose big.
One of the most well-regarded space investment companies is called The
Space Fund, based in Texas. They do a significant amount of tracking of how
the space enterprise industry is evolving. Their SpaceFund Reality (SFR) is
becoming an important industry standard. The SFR rating is designed to pro-
vide investors, customers, regulators, media, and the industry itself with a
quick guide and assessment of players old and new in the various subsectors
of the space industry, including:
• Transportation
• Communication
• Human Factors
• Supply Chain
• Energy
All are vital parts of any serious Mars city planning and design.
Musk and most other people pioneering the space frontier are not urban
planners. This is why Justin’s book is so important now.
A Preview of the Book
The First City on Mars does something no other book has done: it has laid out
a serious scholarly framework to approach urban planning on Mars, drawing
on the best science and engineering knowledge and putting it all together in
a coherent, logical, human-centered plan for the first city on Mars.
The book begins with a concise history of our spacefaring experience, high-
lighting the remarkable advances humans have made in just seven decades.
The focus of this history is on space architecture and urbanism, with lessons
Foreword ix
derived mainly from the two decades of experience we now have colonizing
low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Next, the book considers the notion of colonization – warts and all – and
draws some insightful conclusions about what city planners on Mars need to
know from the experience of colonizers of Asia, North America, and Oceania
in the 16th through 20th centuries.
The next four chapters review the psychological, transportation, construc-
tion, and other infrastructure dimensions of building cities, reviewing the
state-of-the-art science and best practices, focusing particularly on inhospita-
ble, arid, and frigid spots on Earth – close analogs to Mars. Principles for each
of these dimensions are presented at the end of each chapter, which are fed
into a plan for a Martian city in Chap. 11.
Before launching into that plan, Hollander spends two chapters reviewing
precedents, examples of where thoughtful and creative writers, scientists, and
explorers put pen to paper and articulated a vision of a city on Mars, and more
broadly in outer space.
I am pleased that my plan for a proposed Mars World city of the future
experience park and luxury resort for Las Vegas is included in this analysis and
particularly happy to see elements from my plan – and many others – included
in the final plan Hollander shares in Chap. 11.
The book then concludes by acknowledging the limitation of the approach
Hollander took here and points readers to avenues for taking the implications
of this book both beyond Mars into the Solar System and right here on Earth.
My Career as a Space Architect
It made good sense when Justin asked me to write the foreword to this book.
I’m trained as an architect and for the past 30 plus years have been pioneering
outer space architecture, working with NASA and space enterprise companies
on the design of the ISS and several other real “human-rated” projects, includ-
ing Moon bases and Mars mission planning and habitat design.
Human-rated means that people will be living and working in the space-
ships or space facilities, so the design and engineering and safety systems must
be significantly more robust than for un-manned vehicles. They are also far
more expensive and complicated.
Much of my Mars design work has been done with Dr. Buzz Aldrin, famed
astronaut from the historic Apollo 11 first Moon landing and a very good
designer in his own right. He is full of ideas and passionate about Mars explo-
ration and settlement. He and I advised movie director and producer James
x Foreword
Cameron of Terminator, Titanic and AVATAR movie fame on a film he is
working on about Mars. That was fun.
I only work on human-rated space projects. To date four of them have
flown in space, some multiple times. They include the ISS; SpaceHab, a mod-
ule added to the Space Shuttle cargo bay that doubled the living and working
areas; and the Endeavor Space Shuttle Mid Deck.
I was also involved at the beginning of Bob Bigelow’s inflatable modules for
Bigelow Aerospace orbital hotel and lunar hotel. One of his small modules is
attached to the ISS, which the crew uses as a storage area. I’m currently design-
ing a real orbital super yacht called Destiny that would be assembled in orbit
and provide amazing experiences for 10 passengers and 6 human crew mem-
bers. Also, I’m doing early planning and design for the first Orbital Yacht
Club that would provide the same services as ocean yacht clubs.
For several years I worked with Buzz Aldrin on his concept and designs for
Mars Cyclers that would use the gravitational pull and push of the Earth and
Mars as a transportation system between the planets. Like sailing ships that
use trade winds and ocean currents to move them, the Mars Cyclers would be
the carrier vehicle for smaller space ships that would hop on and off as they
pass Earth or Mars.
Some of the exciting challenges of planning and designing a real Mars City
is that you have to get deep into the sciences and other issues far beyond a city
on Earth. You have to deal with traveling at least 50 million miles one way.
Mars has 38% of normal Earth gravity and only 44% of the sunlight that
reaches Earth. Basically, it has no atmosphere, so you need to create your own
air and clean it and move it around.
While Mars has large deposits of ice, you need to mine it and turn it into
drinking water and grow your own food. The only building materials are sand
and rock. And you must have significant radiation shielding on the way to
and on the planet. On top of that, you need to generate your own energy. The
best reliable energy sources for space at the moment are small nuclear reactors.
In parallel with my real outer space architecture projects I have been creat-
ing, designing, and building space/future themed entertainment projects
around the world and consulting on many other space themed movies and
TV shows. Working on real space projects adds an authenticity to my space
entertainment projects, which in turn promotes real space exploration and
settlement.
For the Mars World project, authenticity is critical to this highly immersive
invented world, so I spent years planning and designing a real Mars city first,
then used it as a model for the Earth-based experience park.
