Space Apps Challenge 2018

When Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX unveiled his plan to colonize Mars before 2024 (or 2031), the scale and importance of the project became clear to the world. However, there were sets of technical problems associated with the colonization; such as: growing crops on Mars’ soil, recycling water and human waste, creating ideal environment for humans to live in, and so on...

Our team decided to design a Framework for a base on Mars, that could be used to create a temporal (or even long-lasting) settlements.

We have created an elementary component called Clepsydron – a spherical engineering mechanism that can collapse from its opened state to a folded state.

Since colonization of Mars has rocket restrictions, such as volume and mass of transported cargo, it was important for our Framework of a base to have the following properties:

(a) The transformable elementary components must exist;

(b) The Framework must fit our varying design and measurements;

(c) The Framework must transform into a smaller, folded mechanism;

(d) The Framework must have minimal surface area and maximal volume.

Final project is made up of two components: airproof membrane, which will be wrapped up from inside to ensure the rigidity of the construction and seal atmospheric environment created inside, and the framework. Framework can be split up in several chains (usually 3 or 4) for easier manufacturing process, which, in of itself, can be split up to individual Clepsydra cells. All Clepsydron having an ability to transform, entire construction can be folded into a rocket, and sent for a deployment.