Basically impossible to discuss without knowing the effect of partial gravity on human health.
The ice-house idea is nonsense, sadly NASA seemed to have based the award on how much like of a modern architecture monstrosity it would be, note that this idea cooked up by just such an architectural firm.A building made of ice would by necessity have walls and air at freezing temperatures inside at all times and that would raise the metabolic requirements of anyone living in it to two or three times the normal calorie intake because the body must generate so much more heat. The interior air's moisture will freeze out as layer of frost on to the interior much like the frost in a refrigerator, ruining the 'view' and making the air extremely dry and uncomfortable. This frost will need to be constantly scraped off or else it will just grow forever and fill the habitat. The incredible mass of all this ice is likely to cause ground subsidence and cracking in the ice walls. Dust accumulation on the exterior will likewise rapidly render the interior dark.When NASA puts a stamp of approval on nonsense like this it encourages space-cadet type thinking in all kinds of other areas.
One thing is the habitat itself. Another is the interior. What if the 2-3 m3 travelling-rooms (like the Japanese capsule/tube hotels) could be removed at the end of the trip from the ITS and transferred to the new habitats? At least for the initial rounds this would make creating the sleeping spaces very easy (until bigger rooms can be provided) and efficient, would make the ITS lighter for the return leg, etc. They could be stacked (again, like in the capsule hotels, or like in The Fifth Element).Edit: There are some spectacular capsule hotel ideas around: https://www.google.com/search?q=capsule+hotel&tbm=ischThese could be made robust enough to connect to a central air recycling system, so that they could be used as temporary safehouses in case of a depressurization event.
I think that you will just NEED to build your habitats from local resources. Bringing them in one piece or in components from Earth will be prohibitively expensive, you will need all the payload capacity you have for other things.
Ice Dome Construction for Large Scale Habitats on Atmosphere Less Bodiesas attached with examples
Quote from: uhuznaa on 10/12/2016 09:49 amI think that you will just NEED to build your habitats from local resources. Bringing them in one piece or in components from Earth will be prohibitively expensive, you will need all the payload capacity you have for other things.Well inevitably the first habitats on Mars will be Earth-made, but I refer to the first landings and the first teams to explore but then get down to the serious construction. Once you have the equipment to shove regolith around and hopefully funnel it into 3D printing machines things open up. The initial tin cans and inflatable tents might handle on the order of 3-10 people, whereas an actual city must house hundreds and eventually thousands onward.My guess for the overall design of say a medium-sized settlement (or a very large base camp) with ~200 people would be the following:1) Roomy but claustrophobic living space; no windows lots of dirt covering a 3D built structure.2) Numerous garden areas, possibly domes, but primarily for plants to take advantage of natural sunlight.3) Handful of metal nodes, such as airlocks or power systems, peaking out; mainly delivered from Earth but slowly becoming Martian-built.In short, there would be lots of squat, building-sized mounds with greenhouses.They would be this way because the safest landing sites probably will be in flat, boring areas with little else but the materials to build structures from. No caves, lava tubes, or cliffs...just you, your machinery, and the dirt. Hence why we might see slightly-boring-looking mounds for buildings on Mars...at least until you get a large enough population that starts barking for window space, then it may get more exotic.
There probably already is a thread about lava tubes, somewhere on the site?Anyone have a link? That could be amazing and spectacular.
Quote from: TheTraveller on 10/12/2016 10:39 amIce Dome Construction for Large Scale Habitats on Atmosphere Less Bodiesas attached with examplesMethod only works at high altitudes on Mars.You need to insulate the dome if you want to have above 0 temperatures inside.I believe there is a limit to the altitude the ITS can land because it requires aerodynamic braking. Do the two match up?On the other hand, the mechanical characteristics of ice can be improved significantly by additives, to create a material similar to fiber reinforce plastics, Pykrete. The same dome could be build from the outside, rather than from the inside, using hoses and a supply of fibrous material. Wouldn't be transparent, though, although perhaps translucent, depending on the fiber used.What is the cheapest fiber than can be obtained/produced on Mars?What is the heat balance of a Martian building? Houses are not very energy intensive, but the heat load from an efficient plantation may be quite high, for example. A greenhouse (or more aptly a grow house) in ice might be a significative challenge, at the lighting levels can reach hundreds of watts per m2. Intensive grow houses on Earth require active cooling. So you may have a cheap building, but if it requires constant active cooling and a radiative cooling system, it may not be the safest place to live.
Method only works at high altitudes on Mars.ot be the safest place to live.
Quote from: lamontagne on 10/12/2016 11:34 amQuote from: TheTraveller on 10/12/2016 10:39 amIce Dome Construction for Large Scale Habitats on Atmosphere Less Bodiesas attached with examplesMethod only works at high altitudes on Mars.You need to insulate the dome if you want to have above 0 temperatures inside.I believe there is a limit to the altitude the ITS can land because it requires aerodynamic braking. Do the two match up?On the other hand, the mechanical characteristics of ice can be improved significantly by additives, to create a material similar to fiber reinforce plastics, Pykrete. The same dome could be build from the outside, rather than from the inside, using hoses and a supply of fibrous material. Wouldn't be transparent, though, although perhaps translucent, depending on the fiber used.What is the cheapest fiber than can be obtained/produced on Mars?What is the heat balance of a Martian building? Houses are not very energy intensive, but the heat load from an efficient plantation may be quite high, for example. A greenhouse (or more aptly a grow house) in ice might be a significative challenge, at the lighting levels can reach hundreds of watts per m2. Intensive grow houses on Earth require active cooling. So you may have a cheap building, but if it requires constant active cooling and a radiative cooling system, it may not be the safest place to live.Thermal management will just be one of the problems you will have to solve. But if you're sitting in the midst of a glacier stretching for tens of miles and half a mile thick, some water coolant loops that dump the heat somewhere else (or heat your insulated fish pool) shouldn't be that hard. It's basically only slightly used energy, you will find a use for it...
People who lives in meltable houses need to worry about heat ;-)In a more serious vein (of underground water) coolant loops and piping can get expensive. You can simply dump melted water into the atmosphere, where it will sublimate nicely enough. Should just need a fairly small pool. but you can't cool your ice house with liquid water, since it is necessarily hotter than the ice. You would need to use salt water (brine), or a glycol. then you will be using salt and recycling it, which can get intensive on a large scale.Or you can use large arrays of piping, but large arrays of piping are extremely expensive, just talk to geothermal heat pump vendors...