Okay,
so that was pretty much all I found for ideas about Martian shelters: tents of
various shapes made of multiple layers of flexible plastic and insulation
(probably foam), either buried in the sand or not; tunnels and rooms dug deep
underground by robots; and a top-side shelter shaped like half a bagel with a
layer of ice between the sheets of plastic.
I did
see some reference to making a spun glass (fiber glass) insulation from sorting
the Martian sand and melting a particular type of that sand. I’m not sure that
would be available for the very first shelters, but maybe it would be a useful
building material later on.
For
that matter, rocks have been used to build human home for centuries, perhaps millennia.
Sand could be combined with other materials to make a type of cement or even mortar.
That assumes the colonists can find a supply of calcium silicate nearby, or
some other binder to use. If not, they could use polymers, but that would need
to be shipped to them from Earth, or they would have to make it on Mars, and I
have no idea how complicated a process that might be.
One
other idea, briefly mentioned, was to dig holes into a large boulder to create
a small shelter, perhaps a type of emergency shelter. I kept thinking about
today’s ‘tiny homes’ and thinking a sufficiently large boulder might make a
nice small home for someone who really liked his/her privacy.
So,
if you are going to be one of those first colonists sent to Mars, don’t expect
a mansion. Of course, if you were expecting a mansion, you probably wouldn’t be
one of those chosen to colonize Mars. Or anyplace else.
http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/a-new-home-on-mars-nasa-langley-s-icy-concept-for-living-on-the-red-planet
https://phys.org/news/2016-12-nasa-ice-house-mars.html
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