How to Stay on Mars
Before we can settle the Red Planet, we’ll have to rethink what it means to call a place home.
28 January 2025
Mars will not make survival easy.
But in its vastness, it offers something rare: a blank page for new ways of living.
On Earth, a home is something we inherit—a shelter shaped by history, culture, and memory. On Mars, a home will be something we invent from scratch, stitched together from hope, necessity, and dust. If we want to stay, we will have to build places that can hold not just our bodies, but our dreams.
And that’s where Brent Sherwood comes in.
Across a career spanning Boeing, NASA collaborations, and leadership roles at Blue Origin, Sherwood has spent decades not just imagining life in space, but asking how we can design it—thoughtfully, sustainably, humanely. When I sat down with him for the inaugural episode of the Aspiring Martians monthly series, Everyday Mars, one thing became clear: if we dream of one day walking the bustling streets of a Martian city, we must first ask ourselves a far harder question.
“The community of space architects defines it very succinctly,” he told me. “It is the theory and practice of designing and building inhabited environments for use in space.”
This is the story of how we might build not just shelters, but societies, 140 million miles from Earth.
“First, we have to learn to survive...”
The Six Tenets of Space Architecture
Sherwood’s definition of space architecture is simple — but the implications are enormous.
Designing and building inhabited environments for use in space means confronting a world where every basic constant of human life must be manufactured. “There are design choices,” he explained.
In short: before we can live beautifully, we must first survive brutally.
And that begins with six unyielding principles.
Atmospheric Containment
The first principle is as literal as it is unforgiving: keep the air in.
“It starts with containing atmospheric pressure, which is hard to do,” Sherwood said. “At sea level atmosphere on Earth, which feels normal to us, the atmosphere exerts almost fifteen pounds of force on every square inch of surface. You don’t notice it on Earth because the pressure just surrounds us. But if you’re in space where it’s vacuum, you have to build something that contains that pressure by resisting that force.”
Every Martian wall, every bulkhead, must bear that invisible weight. On Mars, where the atmosphere is less than one percent of Earth’s and made mostly of carbon dioxide, the planet may look open — but it is essentially a vacuum.
Containment is survival.
He gestures toward the future cities so often drawn as transparent domes glittering beneath an ochre sky. “All these concepts that you see, artist concepts of these like crystalline domes…” He stops himself and laughs. “It’s not going to be like that.”
And yet, he refuses the idea that this future must feel dark or subterranean. “Just because it’s inside opaque shielding doesn’t mean it needs to feel like you’re in a cave,” he said. “Roman streets are interior architecture. The façade faces the volume. Gothic cathedrals are interior architecture. They have small windows, very high up, but it doesn’t feel like a cave. And the modern example is shopping malls.”
The task of a Martian architect, then, is to build interiors that feel infinite — spaces that make protection look like freedom.
Gravity
If pressure is predictable, gravity is not.
Mars offers about three-eighths of what we know on Earth. It seems manageable — enough to stand, to walk, to build. But as Sherwood cautions, “We have zero data about that.” No one knows whether human bodies can truly endure partial gravity for decades or generations. Will bones weaken, hearts strain, children grow differently? We can only guess.
And yet, we will have to build as though we know. Doorways will be taller. Ceilings higher. Furniture lighter. Cities may stretch upward because gravity allows them to. The very rhythm of daily life — the gait of a step, the sway of a body — will become a new language.
Designers will have to anticipate how people will move in a world that invites them to leap just a little higher, that tempts them with an ease their muscles were never built for. Mars will demand an architecture of adaptation — not monumental, but flexible, provisional, designed for bodies still learning to belong.
Radiation and Shielding
If gravity is the gentle unknown, radiation is the merciless one.
Mars has no magnetic field and a wafer-thin atmosphere. Cosmic rays and solar storms pour through its skies like invisible fire. “We think that the Mars atmosphere will do a partial job of what the Earth’s atmosphere does,” Sherwood said, “but we don’t yet know how bad the radiation environment will be.”
Protection, then, is nonnegotiable. Habitats will likely be buried beneath regolith or shielded by walls of water and polyethylene. Light will be precious — filtered, borrowed, remade by design rather than nature.
Sherwood is quick to correct misconceptions: Mars will not be a planet of glittering glass domes. “Those transparent domes you see? Uh-uh. It’s not going to be like that.”
Yet even under meters of shielding, the city need not feel entombed. He points again to cathedrals — their filtered daylight, their echoes of scale and reverence. Architecture, he insists, must still aspire to beauty. It must not only defend life but remind it why it endures.
“At the end of the day, death is on the other side of the wall.”
Dust and the Environment
The next enemy is not cosmic, but particulate. Dust — that fine, iron-tinted powder that moves with the planet’s temper.
“Mars dust gets everywhere,” Sherwood said with a grimace that was half amusement. On Earth, dust is nuisance; on Mars, it is constant warfare. The wind there, though thin, is capable of lifting grains into storms that can wrap the globe. The particles cling to seals, infiltrate airlocks, and settle into lungs. Worse still, they may be chemically toxic due to the perchlorates in Martian soil.
It will be, as Sherwood put it, “a constant concern and a kind of routine operational challenge.”
Every habitat, every suit, every gasket will have to be built for dust’s persistence — electrostatic defenses, vacuum chambers, suitport systems that let explorers step directly from vehicles into habitats without dragging the planet in with them.
The red haze will define Martian life as surely as weather defines ours. The challenge is not to conquer it but to coexist — to make peace with a landscape that insists on being everywhere at once.
Resources and Self-Sufficiency
The fifth tenet is perhaps the most philosophical: a settlement cannot depend on Earth.
“If your mission is six people exploring and coming back,” Sherwood said, “you can take it all with you. But if it’s fifty people trying to learn how to live there sustainably — or five thousand people who have a little town — you need access to resources because you can’t bring it all from home.”
That sentence — you can’t bring it all from home — is more than logistical. It’s existential.
Every civilization begins the moment it must fend for itself. On Mars, that turning point will come when we learn to build from the planet’s own materials. The first habitats, called Class 2, will be prefabricated shells ferried from Earth and assembled like camping tents in the dust. But Class 3 habitats — the first true Martian cities — will be built from what the planet offers: regolith, ice, metals, and imagination.
3D printing will help, but Sherwood warns against easy optimism.
“So far, the technologies for additive are basically only good for radiation shielding,” he said. “They’re not good for containing pressure.” The real leap will come when we learn to extract and forge metals, to build from cast iron and composites born of Martian soil.
If that sounds primitive, it’s meant to. Mars will force us to rediscover the ingenuity of our ancestors — the artisans and engineers who built cathedrals from stone and iron with little more than patience and necessity.
The materials will change. The instinct won’t.
Livability and Society
The final tenet — and perhaps the most important — is livability. Because even in a world engineered for survival, no one wants to live in a survival shelter forever.
Sherwood imagines a future city dense, alive, and unsanitized. “However good we get at making environments in space out of local resources,” he said, “economics will always favor density.”
Forget the pastoral scenes of O’Neill’s space colonies, with their green fields and endless sky. Mars will feel more like Manhattan than Montmartre — stacked, humming, efficient. And yet, not lifeless. “There is no such thing as human living in a sterile environment,” he said. “We will have biologically-based life support… there will be agriculture, and there will be a lot of life.”
He imagines wetlands filtering water, fish feeding chickens, gardens growing under soft artificial suns. In these ecosystems, plants and microbes will share the same oxygen and waste loops as people. Some life will sneak in — the accidental, the unplanned. “Somebody will take some cockroach eggs just to do it,” he said with a laugh. “And then there’ll be cockroaches.”
That’s not contamination. It’s culture. Because a true Martian city will be messy, loud, unpredictable — proof that life has taken hold.
But Sherwood also reminds us that life there will carry a constant awareness of fragility. “At the end of the day, death is on the other side of the wall,” he said. Rules, trust, and shared responsibility will define Martian society more than any law. You cannot be careless in a world that depends on your caution. You cannot be selfish in a habitat that shares one breath.
And over time, even humanity itself will adapt. “By the time we get to a million people living on a planet,” he told me, “it’s not clear to me that those people are people like you and me. They’ll be related to us, but they won’t be us. They’ll be a space species of human.”
Perhaps that is the ultimate act of architecture — not the shaping of stone, but of ourselves.
Indoor Worlds: How Mars Cities Will Feel Open Even Underground
When we hear that Martian settlements will be underground or heavily shielded, it's easy to imagine a life of tunnels and claustrophobic compartments. But according to Sherwood, that’s the wrong way to think about it.
Future Martian cities will feature sweeping indoor spaces—multi-level atriums filled with greenery, public squares for concerts and gatherings, artificial skylights that cycle through sunrise to sunset. Parks might span entire modules. Even the ceilings, high and arching, could mimic open skies through dynamic lighting.
Inside these pressurized worlds, settlers will move freely—no helmets, no suits, no sense of being trapped. Life will be bustling, complex, alive.
Children could run. Couples could picnic. Artists could display massive installations. All within carefully managed atmospheres that cradle human life in an otherwise merciless environment.
Sherwood suggests we already have templates for how these spaces could feel. Modern malls, airports, mega-hotels—all offer examples of how to craft places where thousands of people gather, live, and move without feeling confined.
The goal isn’t to hide from Mars—it’s to build vibrant, indoor worlds so rich and dynamic that settlers may hardly notice they’re inside at all. Think more Singapore mall than military bunker. Think Changi Airport’s vast gardens, the bustling covered souks of ancient cities, the atrium plazas of dense urban centers.
On Mars, these design strategies will evolve from convenience to necessity.
Architecture as Emotional Engineering
Protection is physical. But survival, Sherwood knows, is emotional.
The architecture of Mars must heal the mind as much as it shelters the body. The absence of nature — of sky, wind, sunlight — will weigh heavily. So every design element must work to reintroduce it: warm lighting, running water, vibrant color. “Part of the task of the designer,” Sherwood said, “is to make [these spaces] commodious and pleasant for the human occupants.”
In other words, architecture becomes therapy. Each sound, scent, and texture must remind settlers that they are still human — that life is not just the absence of death, but the presence of feeling.
Everyday Life in a Pressurized World
On the International Space Station, thirteen people once shared a photo — the most humans ever in one place beyond Earth. Sherwood still remembers that image.
“You stuff everybody into the Destiny lab module and you take a photo,” he said with a smile. “There is no real place for what we would traditionally call assembly.”
That, he believes, will change everything. When we can finally build a city large enough for a festival, a school, a concert — when we can gather — that’s when we’ll have truly arrived. On Mars, daily life will unfold almost entirely indoors. But that doesn’t mean it will feel smaller.
Imagine waking in a sun-drenched apartment, walking to a public square filled with music and children playing, visiting markets that buzz with local flavors, gathering for events under sweeping ceilings lit like the Martian sky.
Maybe you stop for coffee at an indoor café, pass street performers playing adapted instruments that don't need atmospheric amplification, meet a friend under the arch of a green-lit atrium. Shops and offices line the passages. Schools and clinics hum in their dedicated modules. Hydroponic gardens open into public food courts where harvest festivals become real civic holidays.
Children will grow up accustomed to ceilings twenty meters overhead instead of true sky. They’ll learn the slow ritual of airlocks when stepping into outerwear suits for excursions beyond the city shells.
The settlers of Mars will redefine what it means to move through public life—not with less humanity, but perhaps with more careful, intentional connection.
This will be the new ordinary: life compressed, but not diminished. Friendships will form along garden paths. Celebrations will fill open spaces with laughter. Schools, theaters, workshops, civic centers—all stitched into the beating heart of a living city.
In adapting to this pressurized world, we may learn that connection was never about distance or wilderness. It was always about proximity of spirit.
Changing Mars — and Ourselves
Building on Mars will change the planet. But more profoundly, it will change us.
It will teach us to value community over privacy, resilience over comfort, adaptability over tradition. It will remind us that the hardest structures to build are not of metal or regolith, but of trust, patience, and collective dreaming.
A city on Mars will not be a copy of Earth. It will be something new—something made not in spite of constraint, but because of it.
Signal Received
Architecture on Mars will not be built out of blueprints alone. It will be built from the fragile, stubborn hopes we carry into the void.
We often imagine Mars as a canvas for technology. But in the end, what may matter most is not what we build, but how it feels to live inside it. Brent Sherwood reminds us that the real task of Martian settlement isn’t just technical.
It’s emotional.
It’s about designing places that don’t just protect bodies, but sustain spirits. Places where life can unfold not as a grim calculation of needs, but as a celebration of possibility. In learning to build for another world, we may find that we are also learning how to finally build better for ourselves. To live on Mars, we’ll need shelters and systems. But to stay, we’ll need something more: places that make us feel human again.
Closer. Smarter. Kinder.
Maybe that's what it will take—not just to survive Mars, but to deserve it.
It’s not a utopia. But it’s warm. There’s laughter echoing through the canteen. Someone’s planted mint and lavender beside the algae pond. An elder reads a story to two toddlers in a corner pod, while behind them, a teenager sketches the curve of Olympus Mons onto her tablet. The light is soft. The air is kind. And for the first time in a long while, someone thinks not about survival, but about beginning.
And they know: this is where I want my child to be born. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Brent Sherwood for the inaugural episode of Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars, "Architecture on Mars" which aired on 28 January 2025.