Moving to Mars

Arrive. Survive. Thrive.

Getting humans to Mars has become one of the great challenges of our time. Mars holds the potential of human settlement, and the promise of life after Earth. Some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, architects and engineers are dedicated to conquering this next frontier.

Moving to Mars: Design for the Red Planet is one of the first books to focus on the crucial role that design will play in this collective endeavour. From the capsules that will need to keep passengers in harmony during their nine-month journey, to the habitats that they will live in, to the terraforming of the landscape to make it life-sustaining, every detail needs to be designed. This task is falling to the traditional space agencies such as NASA, and to private entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson, and to architects such as Norman Foster. As well as technical and practical solutions, this book will examine how design and design thinkers are approaching our move to Mars in unexpected ways.

With striking, rarely-seen imagery and a unique design-led focus, this book will appeal to ‘space junkies’ and design enthusiasts alike.

About the Author

Justin McGuirk is Chief Curator at the Design Museum. He was formerly the design columnist for The Guardian and editor of Iconmagazine. He is the author of Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (2014), and editor of California: Designing Freedom (2017) and Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow (2018).

Alex Newson is Senior Curator at the Design Museum and editor of Designer, Maker, User (2016)