Next Stop, Red Planet

A four-module structure printed out at New Haven’s MakeHaven may pop up again in outer space, enabling humans to explore a planetary neighbor up close.

A ​“space nerd” who lives on a sailboat at City Point had the vision, then put together the plan.

The space nerd, Nicholas McGhee, assembled a team to design a Mars incubator. They built it at the Make Haven maker space on State Street, printing out the walls for a model piece by piece.

Then they submitted it to a ​“3D-Printed Habitat Challenge” run by NASA. And NASA dug it. The agency last week awarded the New Haven team $32,623.88, one of three finalist prizes (which totaled $100,000).

McGhee, who became a ​“space nerd” in college when he shifted his major from graphic arts to engineering, plans to use the prize to continue the quest for a high-pressure resistant facility that astronauts could occupy for a year on the red planet.

Toward what end?

“Learning about how that planet was formed and how that relates to our planet and our place in the world,” McGhee said during an appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” (or, for that one day, ​“Dateline Mars”) program.

McGhee, who’s 32, grew up loving nature in rural East Hartland, Connecticut. He took to sailing, too. He brought his sailboat with him when he moved to New Haven last year. He docks the 33-foot-by‑9 ‑foot boat at City Point’s Pequonnock Yacht Club, and lives on the boat. That helps him meet his student loan payments. (Total annual cost for docking and storage: $4,000.)

Storms and high winds, like Wednesday night’s, don’t bother him.

“I feel completely safe,” he said. ​“It’s kind of nice. It rocks you to sleep.”

All the better for dreaming about life up amid the stars.

What It Is

NASA challenged competitors to create their habitats, to house four astronauts, out of material found on Mars. McGhee’s team relied on basalt fibers, which can be produced from bedrock found on the planet; and polyethylene, made from carbon dioxide (which is abundant there) to help make strong walls to withstand Mars’s far lower-pressure environment.

The astronauts would live in close quarters and eat in a common area. And they wouldn’t need their space suits on.

“Oxygen you can create on Mars from water,” McGhee said. ​“There is water on Mars; the quantity and dispersion of it is still under debate.”

The structure at full size would run up to between 14 and 30 feet in diameter (at its widest) by 9 feet. It has four connected modules.

The largest primary module would contain bunk beds, a kitchen, a bathroom, a lab, and a recreation area.

Meanwhile, the astronauts could grow and experiment with plants in a bio-generation module. The idea would be both to learn about how the plants develop on Mars and, McGhee said, to have ​“something to foster and feel good about. It’s a dead and cold planet. So we need to bring as much life to it as we can.”

Like a modern-day public school, the habitat would have a multipurpose room to exercise, stow chairs, and handle emergencies.

The final module would be lab space with its own HVAC system to keep it sterile, to ​“minimize the cross contamination of the Martian environment to the living space, and vice versa,” McGhee said.

Read all the details of the design here in the final report McGhee’s team submitted to NASA. Watch a detailed presentation in the above video.

Next Frontier

McGhee is flying to Peoria, Illinois, for the NASA awards May 1 – 4. He’ll put the habitat on display for visitors and show the video. (He also hopes to take a detour to Arizona to visit Biosphere 2.)

When he receives the $32,623.88 check, he plans to recoup the $5,470 he spent on supplies for the experiment and distribute $10,000 to his six team members (Chris Colangelo, Jason Monnes, Brian Young, Chris Robinson, and Biana L. Ruthven).

McGhee plans to use the rest of the money not on himself, but to buy equipment to take the experiment further, with the hope of developing the technology for practice use here on Earth as well as … designing the space station that may one day in fact house astronauts on Mars. He told NASA the project could use, for instance, a more powerful microprocessor and a heated platen press. He intends to house new equipment at MakeHaven, where the race to outer space will continue.

In the WNHH interview, McGhee was asked to name his favorite Mars song: David Bowie’s ​“Space Oddity”? Bowie’s ​“Is There Life on Mars?” Elton John’s ​“Rocketman”? The Kinks’ ​“Supersonic Rocket Ship”?

“I like Bruno Mars,” he responded.

Click on the video to watch the full episode of WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline Mars” with incubator designer Nicholas McGhee, in which he explains how the prize money ended up being calculated precisely to $32,623.88. Find out more about his Mars Incubator project here.