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Beyond space exploration, the next critical step towards living and workingin space requires developing a space economy. One important challenge with thisspace-economy is ensuring the low-cost transport of raw materials from onegravity-well to another. The escape delta-v of 11.2 km/s from Earth makes thisproposition very expensive. Transporting materials from the Moon takes 2.4 km/sand from Mars 5.0 km/s. Based on these factors, the Moon and Mars can becomecolonies to export material into this space economy. One critical question iswhat are the resources required to sustain a space economy? Water has beenidentified as a critical resource both to sustain human-life but also for usein propulsion, attitude-control, power, thermal storage and radiationprotection systems. Water may be obtained off-world through In-Situ ResourceUtilization (ISRU) in the course of human or robotic space exploration. Basedupon these important findings, we developed an energy model to determine thefeasibility of developing a mining base on Mars that mines and exports water(transports water on a Mars escape trajectory). Our designs for a mining baseutilize renewable energy sources namely photovoltaics and solar-thermalconcentrators to provide power to construct the base, keep it operational andexport the water using a mass driver (electrodynamic railgun). Our studiesfound the key to keeping the mining base simple and effective is to make itrobotic. Teams of robots (consisting of 100 infrastructure robots) would beused to construct the entire base using locally available resources and fullyoperate the base. This would decrease energy needs by 5-folds. Furthermore, thebase can be built 5-times faster using robotics and 3D printing. This showsthat automation and robotics is the key to making such a base technologicallyfeasible.

Autonomous Multirobot Technologies for Mars Mining Base Construction and Operation