STEP into Moving to Mars, an exhibition of Mars mission and colony design at London’s Design Museum, and you are confronted, immediately, with some very good reasons not to move there.
Minatory glowing wall-texts announce that Mars wasn’t
made for you; that there is no life and precious little water; that, clad in a spacesuit, you will never touch, taste or smell the planet you now call “home”. As Lisa Grossman wrote for New Scientist a couple of years ago, “What’s different about Mars is that there is nothing to do there except try not to die”.
It is an odd beginning for such a celebratory exhibition, but it provides a valuable, dark backdrop against which the rest of the show can sparkle – a show that is, as its chief curator Justin McGuirk remarks, “not about Mars; this is an exhibition about people”.
Moving along, there is a quick yet lucid dash through what the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls “the history of Mars in the human mind”. A Babylonian clay tablet and a Greek vase speak to early ideas about the planets. A poster for the original Total Recall film reminds us of Mars’s psychological menace.
The bulk of the show focuses on our current plans for the Red Planet. There are real spacesuits and copies of rovers, models of 3D-printed Martian settlements and prototypes of suitable clothing and furniture. Mission architectures and engineering sketches line the walls. Real hammers meant for the International Space Station (hollow and loaded with ball bearings to increase their utility in zero gravity) are wall-mounted beside a nifty low-gravity table that has yet to leave, and may indeed never leave earth.
This, of course, is the great strength of approaching science through design: reality and speculation can be given equal visual weight, drawing us into an informed conversation about what it is we actually want from a future on Mars.
Halfway round the show, I relaxed in a fully realised Martian living pod made by international design firm Hassell and its engineering partners Eckersley O’Callaghan. (Their full project is visualised above.) They’re taking part in NASA’s
3D-Printed Habitat Challenge – the agency’s programme to develop habitat ideas for deep-space exploration – and it combines economy, recycling, efficiency and comfort in surprising ways. Xavier De Kestelier, Hassell’s head of design technology and innovation, was particularly proud of the chairs, made of recycled packaging:
“The more you eat, the more you sit!”
So much for Martian living. The profound limitations of that life were brought home by a hydroponic system from vertical farming firm Growstack. Its trays of delicious cress and lettuce reminded me, rather sharply, that for all the hype, we are a very long way from being able to feed ourselves away from our home world. We are still at the point where a single sunflower and a single zinnia blossoming aboard the ISS – the former in 2012, the latter in 2016 –
make headlines.
The Growstack exhibit and other materials about Martian horticulture also mark a cultural shift from the strategic, militarised thinking that characterised cold-war space exploration towards more humane, more practical questions about how to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary, severe environment.
The playfulness of “Martian thinking” is quite properly reflected in this lively and family-orientated exhibition. The point, made very well here, is that this play, this freedom from strictures and established lines of thought, is essential to good design. Space forces you to work from first principles. It compels you to think about mass, transport, utility and reusability.
Leaving the show,
I was drawn up short by what looked like some cycling gear. Anna Talvi, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, has constructed her flesh-hugging clothing to act as a sort of “wearable gym” to counter the muscle-wasting and bone loss caused by living in low gravity. She has also tried to tackle the serious psychological challenges of space exploration by permeating her fabrics with comforting scents. Her X.Earth perfumed gloves “will bring you back to your Earth-memory place”, with the smell of freshly cut grass, say, or your favourite horse.
Those gloves, even more than that hydroponically grown lettuce, brought home to me the sheer ghastliness of space exploration.
It is no accident that this year’s most ambitious science fiction movies, Aniara and Ad Astra, both focus on the mental and spiritual damage we would face were we ever to swap our home planet for a life of manufactured monotony.
There is a new realism creeping into our ideas of living off-world, along with a resurgence of optimism and possibility. This is good. We need light and shade as we plan our next great adventure. How else can we ever hope to become Martian?
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