Land, Liberty and Latency

Some months ago I entered the Mars Society City State Design Competition, to design a city on Mars for 1 million people. There were many entries and mine was not among those chosen to be presented at the Mars Society conference in October. Therefore, I thought I would share it here.

As I had chosen Hellas Planitia for the site of the city, I decided to call it 'Athens'. This giant crater has the advantage of low elevation, and thus a thicker atmosphere than much of the rest of the planet. This makes landing easier and provides a little additional radiation shielding,

Elevation map of Hellas Planitia from Google Mars. The city would be located in the northern part of the feature.

My main focus in the design was radiation shielding; on the one hand, there is a great deal of hysteria in the popular science press about how dangerous cosmic radiation is for astronauts (to the extend some believe it would stop them going, which it would not) and on the other hand there is sometimes too much co…