Pale Red Dot: a 36-person Mars architecture
The realities of our solar system mean that when humans go to Mars, they will be physically and psychologically on their own for months or even years. There are two broad strategies to keeping them safe until their return to Earth: either keep the mission as short, as simple and as small as possible, to reduce the cumulative risk of a serious incident inherent in a long or complex mission, or alternatively, try to maximize the capabilities and resources available for their self-rescue from any known or unknown contingency.
Constrained by the astronomical costs of launching mass to space, all Mars architectures by NASA to date have opted for the short, simple and small approach. NASA system architects constrain their designs to a small number of crew, a small number of launches, a short mission length and/or low initial mass in Earth orbit, and then attempt to minimize risks and cost subject to the given mission-sizing constraints. However, over the last decade, the advent of reusable boosters and, more recently, reusable upper stages, is set to bring the cost of access to space down by one or more orders of magnitude. Given this, it is interesting to explore the second strategy, that of baselining all the necessary and sufficient robustness-conferring capabilities first, followed by sizing the crew and all their supporting systems after the capability requirements have been set.
Photo: Pale Red Dot poster session at 2023 RASC-AL with NASA judge
The result, Pale Red Dot, is a critically-acclaimed concept for a robust, scalable architecture for the first human mission to Mars. The design process started with setting aside the very stringent crew size and launch mass constraints that were the starting points of all prior Mars design reference architectures. The next step was to target a technically and psychosocially robust outcome. Through several design cycles, we looked into all categories of risks, functional requirements and technology options, ultimately resulting in the blueprinting of a family of energy-rich, water-rich, food-rich and capability-rich architectures. Iteration was essential because of the interdependence between most required capabilities. The baseline architecture includes a Mars Hospital, Mars Makerspace, large private accommodations and various other facilities. The larger versions also include Mars Mission Control facilities (Houston on Mars, instead of on Earth) as well as extensive construction capabilities to build permanent, radiation-free habitats. The capability to organically expand the carrying capacity enhances the robustness of the architecture and starts the process that will eventually lead to Earth independence.
Figure: Two villages of 18 crew each in close proximity, for a total 36 crew with self-rescue capability in the event of a catastrophe affecting either village.
From this baseline, the questions of crew size and mission duration were traded with lifetime cost and dependency on Earth resupplies. The architecture model calculates a variety of cost, benefit and risk metrics. The outcome, Pale Red Dot, proposes two villages of 18 persons each, total 36 persons, in close proximity, with a lifetime cost of $81 billion.
Figure: PALE RED DOT Mission timeline, concept of operations, trajectory optimizations and selected logistics technologies.
Endurance is set to 10 years with limited resupply of 5 tons every two years, and the next crew will be able to overlap with the first crew for 2-4 years for complete knowledge transfer. The large scale confers a number of benefits beyond robustness, including substantial economies of scale and the opportunity to make the first mission to Mars a truly international affair.
Video: Final presentation of the Pale Red Dot concept and Q&A with judges, June 2023, Cocoa Beach, FL
Pale Red Dot received the First Place Overall and Best in Theme: Homesteading Mars Awards from a panel of NASA and industry judges at the 2023 NASA RASC-AL Forum. The RASC-AL website hosts a copy of the technical paper, technical poster and video recording of the final presentation.
My role on Pale Red Dot was lead designer, lead systems engineer and team co-lead. My colleagues on the team were Madelyn Hoying (team co-lead), Yousef AlSadah, Liliana Arias, Ignacio Arzuaga-Garcia, H. Azzouz, John Beilstein, Wing Lam Chan, Ezra Eyre, Dane Gleason, Meltem Ikinci, Divya Krishnan, Yuying Lin, Estelle Martin, Lanie McKinney, Duncan Miller, Cormac O'Neill, Omar Orozco, Palak Patel, Elizabeth Romero, Francisco Sepulveda, David Villegas and Alisa Webb. Our MIT faculty advisors were Prof. Jeffrey Hoffman and Prof. Olivier de Weck, and our mentors were Dr. Alexandros Lordos, Chloe Gentgen and Kir Latyshev.