30 | New Scientist | 26 October 2019
Exhibition
Moving to Mars
Design Museum, London
Until 23 February 2020STEP into Moving to Mars,
an exhibition on the realities
of missions to colonise the
Red Planet at London’s Design
Museum, and you are immediately
confronted 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
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 theOur next big adventure
An exhibition about how to live on Mars shows welcome realism,
along with a resurgence of optimism and possibility, writes Simon IngsInternational Space Station
(hollow and filled 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. They assembled
this as part of 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.Views Culture
RAEBURNHASSELL + ECKERSLEY O'CALLAGHANThe 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.Hassell’s Martian base.
Below, space fashion by
Christopher RaeburnThe Russians were thinking
seriously about these questions
long before everyone else, and it
was good to see Russian space
culture given its due in this
impressively international
show. All through the 19th
century, researchers for the Tsarist
governments tried to develop
agriculture in barely fertile,
mostly frozen Siberia. Well into
the Soviet era, soil scientists were
undertaking extreme expeditions
over vast distances in pursuit of
wild agricultural speculations.
It shows up in Russian popular
culture. The space documentaries
of Pavel Klushantsev, born 1910 in
St Petersburg, are full of succulent
gardens glistening under domes
and bowls full of peaches beside
every workstation, offering a
literal taste of home.
I was delighted to see a
screen showing Mars (1968),
Klushantsev’s saturated,
multicoloured vision of humanity
on the Red Planet. It is the film