How to maximise the local resources?

That question dogged us for many years as we planned our electromech construction crew that would “set up house” on Mars before we got there.

The mechs were fully capable of building adobe houses on Earth.

Water, though, was a key missing factor.

That encouraged us to find liquifying alternatives because we wanted to minimise the material we sent with the mechs.

We could have sent tonnes of sandbags and had the mechs build dry adobe huts under which our habitation modules would fit, providing extra protection in the Martian atmosphere, like parking an RV or caravan in a garage.

We challenged ourselves to create a solution that was both energy-efficient and easy to build.

Then, one day, after we had received the list of common chemical elements in Martian soil samples tested by the first wave of mech probes sent in the early 21st century to find suitable colonisation sites and entered it into our lab network, our semi-autonomous 3D printer on a mobile robot base started constructing an extruded Martian home.

Watching the 3D printbot create its own construction scaffolding was fun as it built a two-story structure that hinged and opened up to accept our current working version at the time of the habitation module that also served as transportation ship and landing craft.

Our Test and Evaluation department set to work calculating the wear-and-tear on the 3D printbot, estimating how many spare parts would be needed as the bot coordinated with the mechs to excavate Martian surface for the right ingredients, processing the Martian soil and then feeding the bot or its future equivalent the “right stuff” for habitation module protective shells.

To verify their theories, they drove the printbot and several prototype mechs out into the high desert, skipping a Martian landing simulation in order to focus on the printbot/mech adobe house construction techniques.

One of our lab personnel proposed commercialising the process, which later helped fund many of our side projects that we encouraged in case a crazy idea panned out and led to better procedures and/or understanding of settling Mars — whole desert communities were 3D-printed, followed by sustainable neighbourhoods in temperate zones around the world.