Mars pioneers could use 3-D printing to create a sustainable human colony on the Red Planet, advocates say.
A team of scientists is developing a plan to use 3-D printing to build locally made houses and food on the Martian surface. These resources would support the lives of people leaving the confines of Earth for the Red Planet.
To make things out of Martian raw materials, however, the first arrivals will need to bring some equipment. Once settlers put industrial cutters and 3-D printers in place, subsequent visitors could start making a variety of objects needed for shelters, greenhouses and even parts for new 3-D printers built on the Red Planet, said Bruce Mackenzie, founder of the Mars Foundation, an organization that aims to build and operate the first permanent settlement on Mars.

A former astronaut’s rocket company is raising money via Kickstarter to make a short documentary that explains the technology behind a propulsion system that could fly people to Mars in just over a month.
“Our goal is to produce a full-length video, full of stunning animations that describe the way in which we intend to use our technology to transform space transportation,” Franklin Chang-Diaz, a retired NASA astronaut and the founder of the company Ad Astra, says in a video describing the Mars rocket documentary.Chang-Diaz earned a doctorate in plasma physics from MIT before he became an astronaut in 1980 and flew on seven space shuttle missions. He founded Ad Astra in 2005 to work on VASIMR, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket.