Ideas worth spreading

How to build for human life on Mars

1,542,171 views |

Melodie Yashar |

TED2022

• April 2022

We're going to be building on the Moon this decade -- and next will be Mars, says space architect Melodie Yashar. In a visionary talk, she introduces her work designing off-world shelters with autonomous robots and 3D printers and explores how it might help uncover radical solutions to some of the problems troubling humans on Earth today.

We're going to be building on the Moon this decade -- and next will be Mars, says space architect Melodie Yashar. In a visionary talk, she introduces her work designing off-world shelters with autonomous robots and 3D printers and explores how it might help uncover radical solutions to some of the problems troubling humans on Earth today.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

Melodie Yashar

Space architect

See speaker profile

Melodie Yashar develops construction technologies to allow us to build on the Moon and, one day, Mars.

A. Scott Howe and Brent Sherwood (eds.) | American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA), 2009 | Book

Out of this World: The New Field of Space Architecture

This book is a compilation on the theory and practice of space architecture written by a global network of practicing space architects.

Olga Bannova | DOM Publishers, 2021 | Book

Space Architecture: Human Habitats Beyond Planet Earth

This book presents the general philosophy of space architecture as a human-centered discipline and features multiple case studies and planned projects from government, industry and academia.

| Explore

NASA's bibliography on Space Colonization

Some of my favorite and (in my opinion) the most inspiring literature on space habitats, settlements and of course colonization is referenced within this bibliography; including work by Haym Benaroya, Peter Eckart and Robert Zubrin, among others.

Gerard K. O'Neill and Freeman Dyson | Collector's Guide Publishing, 2000 | Book

The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

Included within NASA's bibliography on Space Colonization (above), this seminal work outlines a road map for what the United States might do in outer space after the Apollo era, and introduces the O'Neill cylinder as well as other habitat typologies.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.