Martian DIY

We’ve changed our shower to a mist shower, using simple DIY materials.

A mist shower is a simple adaptation you can make to any shower to drastically reduce the water and energy useage, while still getting just as clean!

NASA developed hand held mist showers originally in the 1970’s.

We looked at the work of designer Jonas Gorgen to find out how to make ours. Find out more information here.

We experimented with an additional idea, to arrange the spray in a spiral shape around the body, like a concertina that could be lifted up and down.

Our working mist shower!

How I imagine a guitar would be conceived and realised in a Martian environment

Julian Parsons

I’m sitting in my sleeping pod staring out of the pod portal at the bleak but beautiful Martian landscape. My thoughts turn to Earth and my friends and family whom I left many moons ago. For an unknown reason one of my favourite Earth songs starts to play in my head:

How I wish, how I wish you were here

We’re just two lost souls

Swimming in a fish bowl

Year after year

Running over the same old ground

What have we found?

The same old fears

Wish you were here

My grandad used to play this song on his mechanical rotating player in the 70s, with the song somehow impregnated in the hard plastic he placed on the device.

In my mind the guitar solo starts and, in that moment, I am determined to build myself a guitar from whatever I can find in the community of pods.

I have some aluminium ducting in my store, and I know pod 4 have some aluminium tubes that I could trade for some of the spices I have grown in hydroponics. The trade works and I then head to the community space where the weekly market takes place. I swap some electrical wiring for a small piece of wood from a plant packing case. I cash in some of my community credits for a bag of salvaged nuts and bolts. A high price but it’s the only way I can think to tension the strings and keep the guitar in tune. Back in my pod I take a small electric motor from a drone that crashed after a navigation malfunction.

I take everything to my repair bench where I have a range of simple hand tools mainly made from scrap materials. Using my last tubes of epoxy resin I glue the ducting together to create the neck. I drill the wood and insert the aluminium tubes to create the guitar body. The tuners are made by gluing the nuts into pre-drilled holes, and bolts are screwed in to act as string tensioners. I deconstruct the motor carefully unwinding the delicate copper wire and rewinding onto the pickup frame. The magnets from the motor are glued into the pickup. I glue steel wire from an old air con system into slots I have laboriously cut using my pod made hacksaw.

The guitar is ready, but I have to wait 4 tortuous months for the next supply vessel. I have used 6g of my 20g allowance for a set of electric guitar strings. They finally arrive and I string the guitar hoping that my designs will work and that I haven’t wasted these precious resources.

I plug the reclaimed cable into the coffee can housing the comms circuit amp and speaker. There’s some crackling and popping which stops as I adjust the cable. I hold the guitar in what I believe to be a G major chord. My muscle memory is fading and I have to concentrate hard to reposition my fingers. I draw my right hand across the strings and hear the root, third and fifth notes ring out from the speaker. It’s tinny and slightly out of tune but I feel elated, I have made music on Mars. 

Building a Martian Guitar

How a Martian Guitar was actually conceived and realised on Earth.

Confined in a Martian house with limited opportunities for meaningful, fun activities would be a challenge for most people. Music is thought to be good for wellbeing and playing an instrument as an individual or in a group could have many benefits in such an environment. In this project the idea was to try and build a viable instrument from materials that could be salvaged from a spacecraft, or that could be grown/ manufactured in such an environment.

Tools would be either have to be taken to Mars or manufactured from available materials, therefore, it was decided to use only hand tools that might be available. The one exception was the electric drill. It was envisaged that aluminium components could be salvaged along with nuts and bolts, but that no specialist manufactured components would be available. Some wood has been used in the construction, but this could be replaced by aluminium alloys or hard but workable plastics.

The actual prototype Guitar has been made with recycled aluminium tube (old curtain rail), square section aluminium rod, steel nuts and bolts, and wood from an old worktop. Epoxy glue was used to glue most of the components together. This would have to have been brought to Mars from Earth.

One of the most difficult things to design and make was the tuning system. On Earth constructed guitars the specialist components are made using complex machines. On Mars limited components and tools would be available. The system was designed using a nut and bolt arrangement to tension the strings and therefore allow independent tuning of each string.

The electric guitar pick-up converts the string vibrations into a small electrical signal that is amplified and then converted back to sound via a loudspeaker. In the prototype an electromagnetic coil from an old guitar pickup was used. On Mars it could be possible to utilise the coil from a small electrical motor to produce a handmade pickup.

The guitar was fretted using steel wire that was glued into slots in the fretboard. T section fret wire is normally used but this would be unavailable on Mars.

It seemed easier to create an electric guitar rather than an acoustic guitar, as an acoustic guitar tends to rely on the properties of wood, generally unavailable on Mars. However, an electric guitar requires amplification. A simple amplifier electrical circuit, that could be found in a communications device, was built into a Coffee can and a small loudspeaker added to convert the signal into soundwaves.

Tumeric was used to dye the fret board and bridge yellow, to add interest. Tumeric could be grown in the hydroponics area.

The strap was made from kite fabric. This could be obtained from the parachutes, and their harnesses, used to slow down spacecraft entering the Martian atmosphere.

Finally, the experiment did result in a playable instrument. The coffee can amplifier produced a very raw sound quality but of a musical nature. The guitar and amplifier could provide much needed relaxation and stimulation during leisure time.

Fashion on Mars – Anurita Chandola’s highly personalised space suit is on display in the Martian house.

Figure 1 & 2 “Astro Anurita on Mars” – Space suit  

“Spacewear” by Barbara Brownie fuelled my idea of making clothes for space. My  Spacesuit revolves around the idea of being alone in space with personal objects that connect me to my life and family back on Earth.

Figure 3  : Initial concept of Astro Anurita’s Space suit   

While researching about weightlessness and “Mars as a potential destination”, I found out that lot of time and resources have been spent on creating the space suit but, “far less time has been devoted to considering the features of dresses to be worn in the interiors of space vessels”. The environment that is weightless, challenges all the concepts and processes that are taken for granted in the world of fashion and dressmaking. I strongly feel that these methods need to be reconsidered with the “emergence of a commercial space travel industry”. Inspired by Yinka Shonibare’s ‘refuge astronaut’ and Lucy Ortas ‘Refuge wear’, I created a  space suit using my mnemonic objects that represent relations with my family and my cultural background. I created an absolute necessary list of items to carry with me to the “off-planet colony” as every item I carry would have been a “huge expense”. Therefore, the space suit that I made is a multi-functional piece of clothing that could easily be converted into everyday clothing items. 

Figure 4             List of absolute necessary items for Mars journey 

This video provides an insight on how ‘Astro Anurita’ spends a day in space. It is a complete cycle of waking up in a sleeping bag which is then converted to a space suit. Astro Anurita goes for space explorations and then back to space vessel in her zero waste subtraction cutting outfit and an Indian ‘dhoti pants’ inspired shorts. Then after an adventurous day she goes back to her sleeping bag to end her day.

Video 5            Astro Anurita’s day on Mars

Figure 6: Astro Yuri & Astro Stella’s personalised space suits

Figure 7 : Space Helmet

Making a remote letter-writing tool for the Martian house

Liz Lister, August 2022

“Love letters straight from your heart

Keep us so near while apart

I’m not alone in the night

When I can have all the love you write”

Love Letters, lyrics by Edward Heyman and music by Victor Young

One of the challenges of Martian living is the vast distance it will put between humans on Earth and humans on Mars. For the purpose of this project, the assumption is that no physical objects can be cost-effectively exchanged between human populations on Mars and Earth, and that relocating humans between Earth to Mars is a non-trivial, hazardous process that costs many millions and is limited to those who, among other things, accept that they cannot ever return.

Humans in most developed communities are culturally acclimatised to being at most a couple of days by plane from another human they wish to directly communicate with, or prior to air travel maybe a few weeks or months overland or by ship. In both of these cases the physical journey to see someone could be overcome by the sending of a letter, a physical object delivered to someone who, as well as reading the words, could trace the movements of the hand which created them.

There is a reason that even now we still prefer to receive physical greetings cards or postcards written by hand, even if the sender would rather generate something more convenient. And for the big moments in life, like when another human is born or dies, it is the handwritten communications that retain meaning for the recipient long after they’re sent.

An email is not the same. Even if it is written most considerately and formatted with a beautiful cursive font, it lacks the intimacy of a physical handwritten letter. A digital photograph attached to an email or a fax message of a handwritten letter might be better, but is still just an image of a thing and not the thing itself. 

So as long as a physical letter is still a desirable object but one cannot be sent to or from the Martian house, the challenge is to produce a handwritten letter that retains at least some of the qualities of an actual letter but can digitized in order to travel between Earth and Mars in the same way an email or fax message would travel, i.e. by radio signals, and for a physical facsimile of that letter to be manufactured on receipt.

I have tested the principle of creating the .svg and “writing” it on an XY plotter and it works. I now have a letter that was sent to a grandmother (on Mars) from her grandchild, that the grandmother has folded up and keeps in her pocket to show people when they come to visit:

So this was written on a tablet computer acting as a graphics pad, into Inkscape running on a laptop computer, to create the .svg file. This .svg file was then sent to a Cricut machine, an XY plotter that can hold a pen. The Cricut then “wrote” the message out on a piece of paper.

(and no I don’t know who Uncle Ali is either, maybe that’s the subject for the next letter?)

Our brilliant team of volunteers, chosen from open call, who will be co-designing the interiors of the Martian House over the next few months.