Just nipping out for a zero-gravity mocha! Moving to Mars review

‘Nuke Mars!” tweeted Elon Musk in August this year. Having launched a car into orbit and developed a self-landing rocket, the billionaire SpaceX founder seems to have set his sights on bombing the red planet. “T-shirt soon,” he added.

But it wasn’t just another drug-induced whim. Musk has been contemplating the idea since 2015. By nuking the sky over the Martian poles every couple of seconds, he thinks he could create two tiny pulsing “suns” that would melt the ice and release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It would essentially create an instant greenhouse effect, raising the temperature and air pressure of the planet – climate change on demand from the man who marketed flamethrowers for torching marshmallows.

A rotating vision of Musk’s Mars, looking like a smudgy brown version of the Earth, is now on display in the Design Museum, as part of a new exhibition about our lusty relationship with the fourth rock from the sun, provocatively titled Moving to Mars.

“We’ve been successfully putting landers on Mars since 1976,” says chief curator Justin McGuirk, “but people are a different prospect. The human factor changes the conversation from a purely engineering question to one of design. Keeping people alive and sane in a capsule for the seven months it takes to get there is just the start.”

The show takes a broad look at the subject, ranging from attempts to map the planet by 19th-century astronomers, to proposed 3D-printed habitats and even speculative Martian fashions. It is intended to be the museum’s most family-friendly exhibition to date, with activity briefs set for each section and a fun model spaceship hideout where kids can be occupied while parents study fascinating archive material. It’s an accessible introduction to the questions of space habitation, without dumbing down.

Ever since Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli identified the outlines of seas and continents inscribed across the planet’s surface in 1877, we have longed to believe there was some form of life on Mars. His use of the word “canali”, meaning channels, set off a “canal craze”, fuelling dreams of an ancient civilisation that might have once carved these waterways through the red rock. His beguiling maps of the planet, on show in the exhibition, depict islands with names such as Elysium and Utopia, connected by a radial network of channels – an urban pattern echoed in Musk’s plans for a Martian colony later in the show.

Quite how many themes and ideas have persisted through the ages is a recurring theme. McGuirk says the basic principles of mission plans to Mars haven’t much changed since German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun set out “Das Marsprojekt” in 1948, a 91-page manual written while under house arrest in the US, where he was secretly whisked after the war. For Von Braun, it was the ultimate escape fantasy – and, for many of the projects featured in the exhibition, it still is.

For survivalist architects Mars represents a kind of utopian blank slate to test out their most extreme ideas. “It’s the most inhospitable place we’ve ever tried to colonise,” says McGuirk – freezing temperatures, no oxygen, covered in razor-sharp sticky sand and bombarded by radiation. The architectural results, produced for Nasa’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge competition, are predictably bunker-like, comprising low-lying shell forms made by heaping layers of Martian sand over various pod-like modules below.

The winning proposal, by New York firm AI SpaceFactory, differs in that it flips the bunker 90 degrees, forming a beehive-like tower, with working, sleeping and recreational spaces organised vertically, flooded with light from a water-filled oculus in the roof. It’s fair to say that, despite the technical ingenuity, the prototypes on show wouldn’t make anyone much want to move to Mars any time soon.

The real highlight is a section that is less “what if?” dreaming, and more focused on the practical design innovations that the difficulties of zero-gravity space travel have inspired. It features the beautiful drawings of the little-known Russian designer Galina Balashova, the first ever space architect, who worked on the interior design of the Soyuz capsules, and Salyut and Mir space stations for the Soviet space programme. Freed from the limitations of gravity, these habitats could create entirely new kinds of interior space – but Balashova realised that, psychologically, it’s quite useful to have a defined floor, ceiling and walls.

“You need two things to orient yourself in zero-gravity space,” she said. “A sense of direction, and the feeling of being fixed in place.” Her solution was to colour-code the different surfaces: green floor, blue-grey ceiling, pale yellow walls, essentially using colour to replace gravity.

It is a principle that is still maintained in the International Space Station, hidden behind the plethora of cables and control panels. Keeping the astronaut’s mental state in mind, Balashova even produced little watercolour paintings of Russian landscapes to sooth their anxiety during takeoff. They’re displayed alongside a Soviet space hammer, cleverly filled with ballbearings to create momentum, still in use today.

More recent innovations include the zero-gravity coffee cup, which looks a bit like a truncated Shewee, its strange geometry the result of modelling how fluids behave in space. It was developed by the same scientists who usually model things like the movement of rocket fuel, but they decided to turn their attention to how astronauts could enjoy the perfect space espresso, without having to suck it from a bag. The cup tapers to a corner, which acts like a wick, using surface tension to guide the liquid towards your mouth, in little shippable balls of coffee.

It’s an important point made by the exhibition – that if we’re ever going to survive outside the Earth’s orbit in any form, the details of everyday human comforts, such as drinking coffee and being able to look out of a window, will be just as important as calculating landing trajectories. Whatever our interplanetary future holds, designers will have a huge role to play – and maybe inspire us to fix our own planet before the likes of Musk try to destroy others.

• Moving to Mars is at the Design Museum, London, until 23 February.