This Mars Habitation Challenge focuses on a long-term Mars colonization mission focused primarily on utilizing the planet’s weather conditions to store and harvest both energy and construction materials.
 The mission’s primary goal is to survey advances in self-sustainable additive manufacturing techniques in an effort to reduce payload requirements for long-term habitation endeavors. Our manufacturing process consists of harnessing the common silica / basalt dust storms in an effort to melt the material into a translucent and air-tight biosphere. This melting condition will propagate over an autonomously actuated tensile mesh shell consisting of multi-directional modules / or panels, which will be activated depending on wind direction and subsequently deactivated once a density threshold is achieved. Furthermore, 3D printers (hanging from specific nodes within the biosphere)  will print the interior form of the habitat with the same silica / basalt material into geometries catenary in nature.