Japan Times: NASA's 3D Printed Habitat Challenge required participants to design a habitat that could be constructed via 3D printing using Mars's own resources. Last month the agency announced that the Mars Ice House was the $25 000 first-place winning design. Created by Masayuki Sono and Yuko Sono's Clouds Architecture Office in partnership with Space Exploration Architecture, the design uses a 5-cm-thick shell of self-supporting printed ice inside a fluorine-based plastic pressure membrane. The transparent materials stood out from most of the other designs, which used Martian regolith as the primary component.
