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This October, NASA unveiled a proposal to carry people to Mars and leave them there. The project, called the Hundred-Year Starship, would fly four astronauts to the planet, resupply them with food and basic needs, and then let them adapt without the chance to go home. A NASA representative explained that the one-way trip would be more economical than going back and forth to Earth. Plus, by staying on the planet completely alone, the astronauts could thoroughly get to know its make-up. Mars is a rational first choice. It has water, it is near the sun, and it’s our closest neighbor—just a three-month trip away. If we’re going to settle the universe, it’s a good place to start.

The move constitutes one of the agency’s most pointed attempts at inhabiting new planets, and its boldest. Participants in the “Hundred Year Starship” would be denied most of the psychological amenities that mark usual NASA trips—return dates, accolades, the hope of seeing loved ones again. But Pete Worden, the Director of NASA’s Ames Center, defended the plan as a step forward for American space exploration. “The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars.” Now, he suggested, the agency pursues the idea headlong.

It isn’t far off to think of such a trip as a new form of colonial expedition. The proposal’s supporters speak of it with a sort of conquistador rashness, as if preparing to revive the Age of Exploration. In a paper about one way trips to Mars in the Journal of Cosmology, Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies—from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Washington State University and Arizona State University, respectively—describe the project thusly: “Explorers such as Columbus, Frobisher, Scott and Amundsen, while not embarking on their voyages with the intention of staying at their destination, nevertheless took huge personal risks to explore new lands, in the knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that they would perish in the attempt.” Only a bold project, they explain, could push space exploration forward in a time of scientific close-mindedness. Never mind the risks extreme weather poses on a planet where the temperature is often 100° Celsius below zero, or the possibility of radiation sickness, which an astronaut might acquire from the atmosphere without proper shielding: “The main impediment is the narrow vision and the culture of political caution that now pervades the space programs of most nations.”

The agency has begun to work on the project. According to the Daily Mail, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, is one of its main sponsors.

Gumption and a spirit of adventure are all well and good, but the fact is, if you send a human into space, you’ll have to account for his well-being. Enter the space architect. Space architects oversee the design of the cramped living quarters of the International Space Station or the loud cabins of a space rover; they make sure that whatever is carrying humans through the dark void is equipped to do so. It is their job to make the complex systems of wings and motors built by engineers function as a whole. Dr. Larry Bell, a professor at the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture at the University of Houston, the country’s only space architecture degree program, explained it this way to me: “We are kind of like the general practitioners. We are not just looking at the toes or at boob jobs. We’re trying to understand what things are and how they connect together.”

Such supervision is necessary to ensure that all the engineering science is tailored toward human safety. “Being a licensed architect means that you are qualified to protect the health and safety of the public in the built environment,” says Marc Cohen, an architect who has worked for NASA. “Space is a much more unforgiving environment than Earth. If you’re not qualified to protect the health and safety of the public on Earth, how can you do it out there?” Or, as Bell puts it: If you’re going to explore extreme environments, you’ve got to take care of “the human factor.”

Most architects work with models and blueprints, but how do you design a structure when terrestrial experience is no guide? Space architects have to figure out how designs will function when moving in different gravity, or when attacked by incredibly fine dust, or when faced with radiation. A good deal of time is spent looking for the appropriate analogue on Earth. Guy Trotti, who works at MIT and helped found the Sasakawa Institute, rides on the “vomit comet”—a plane whose movements simulate zero gravity—and tries to use his designs under the shaky conditions. If he can’t open a bottle or turn a handle, he builds it again. “I also spend a lot of time underwater with mock-ups,” he says. Some lunar rovers he designed got tested in the desert. He also once participated in an effort to set up a NASA base in Antarctica—the cold weather and uneven surfaces are a good approximation of other planetary surfaces. Today, much of his work is done in labs at MIT, where harnesses and simulators can make you feel like you’re walking on the moon.